Hell III: I'm excited

 ...did you know this blog has been getting up 100,000 hits a day since I started to talk about the Hell book? I'm really surprised. There was a huge spike when I announced I had been working with Bjork--200,000 hits! But this looks more sustained and it's half that size. When you consider that the normal number is about 20,000 a day, and that during the Hyperobjects time it was about 50,000, you'll get a sense of why I'm very excited to be about to share Hell with you. Hyperobjects already sold out its first edition by the time it hit the shelves...I wonder what will happen with Hell. 

I'm ready to talk Christianity. I was surprised that the readers told me I was writing theology, but since then I've come to accept it. 

I'm fed up with how people talk revenge and Old Testament vibes in my line of work. Even the crudest idea of mercy is up a level from there. Until people like me figure that out, no one else will listen to us. 

Why I wrote Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology, Part II

 Environmentalism desperately needs an “I have a dream” moment, a planet-scale call of spiritual magnitude that inspires even people who feel complicit, or despairing, or just numb and uncaring, to create a better future. Enough of the yelling, enough of the revenge speak. 

And environmentalism needs to connect to anti-racism, to feminism, to anti-homophobia, anti-transphobia…

Conversely, religion needs to land on Earth and stop fueling Apocalyptic stories of the necessary destruction of Earth. 

And we are only too well aware of the all-out Christian-fueled assault on “woke” and LGBTQ people, fueled by a demonic sense of being the “goodies.” 

There is a profound relationship between what religion and environmentalism need. 

What if there was something about religion that was deeply environmental, ecological…biological? What if there was something about ecology that responded deeply to religious, or spiritual, or mystical feeling? 

This book finds a solution in a radical revaluation of Christianity. The point is to create a nonviolent army: vulnerable, blessed with a sense of irony, ambiguity, humor and beauty; to see the biosphere as a beautiful accident, driven by the sheer contingency of natural selection, sexual display and symbiosis. 

Ecological politics requires a language of mercy and forgiveness, and Christianity needs to remember mercy and forgiveness. 

The key to both? An all-out assault on the ultimate Satanic mill: the concept of master and slave, manifesting worldwide today in white supremacy and patriarchy. How humans treat each other is how they treat the biosphere. 

I'm Teaching "Walking While Black" Today

 ...it's one of those essays that gets more and more amazing the more you read it. Great essays are like that. They're alive, somehow. They let you breathe. My stepdad and my wife are both Jamaican and and I know exactly what Garnette Cadogan means. 

Why I Wrote Hell

 Ecology needs its "I have a dream" moment. People who feel complicit in big oil (because they, erm, use gasoline pumps...like, EVERYONE) need to be given permission to care. Just like how white people needed permission to be anti-racist knowing at the backs  of their heads how complicit they were. 

AND. Just listen to this. Listen. 

What's in Hell?

 My next book: "Escaping global warming Hell requires a radical, mystical marriage of Christianity and biology that awakens a future beyond white male savagery.”