Extinction & Religion

Human-caused extinctions have never been so prominent in our political and cultural landscape. Extinction and Religion is a collection of wide-ranging chapters that explore the implications for religious faith and experience as it relates to a "sixth mass extinction" in Earth's history. Further it seeks to answer the question as to how religious and spiritual practices are shaping responses to the crisis?

Edited by Jeremy H. Kidwell and Stefan Skrimshire, this collection aims to set a new postsecular agenda, articulating the questions, challenges, and ways forward for thinking about religion in an age of mass extinction rather than provide responses from world religions in isolation. It covers subjects such as the multitude of challenges posed by mass extinction to beliefs about the future of humanity, death and the afterlife, the integrity of creation, and the relationship between human and nonhuman life.

Wide ranging and incisive, Extinction and Religion amply demonstrates the many ways in which the threat of extinction profoundly affects our faith and religious life worlds.

Jeremy Kidwell is Associate Professor of Theological Ethics at the University of Birmingham. His research is action oriented and interdisciplinary, engaging environmental ethics with geospatial data science, activist and multispecies ethnography, critical work in religious studies, and constructive moral theology. His first book The Theology of Craft and the Craft of Work explored an ecological theology of craft, developed in conversation with ancient accounts of craft work and contemporary writing on work and design. Stefan Skrimshire is Associate Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Leeds. He researches the intersection of religious and political responses to the ecological and climate emergency. He is author of Politics of Fear, Practices of Hope and editor of Future Ethics: Climate Change and Apocalyptic Imagination. He lives in the Low Impact Affordable Living Community (LILAC), the UK's first affordable, ecological cohousing community, in Leeds.