If We Lose the Earth, We Lose our Souls

Bruno Latour (1947-2022) was one of the great transdisciplinary thinkers of his generation, and in this book he urges Christians to pay attention to the Earth and recast their faith in the new image of the world emerging from earth system science – one in which we share the Earth with a myriad of beings living in inherent systemic interconnectedness. We are living in an apocalyptic era envisaged in traditional Christian eschatology, a time of inherent precarity and necessary ecological mutation recognised in the papal encyclical of 2015, Laudato Si. Our attitude of hegemony over nature is inherently unsustainable, and we need a new conception of the Common Good. In this sense, ecological eschatology is a discourse on the end of old ways of life – one demanding a radical transformation or metanoia that is also a renewal and an inversion of the old biblical saying reformulated: ‘If you lose the Earth, what good will it do you to have saved your soul?’ Renewing the face of the Earth is a new revolutionary programme.