No Matter What: Crisis and the Spirit of Planetary Possibility

A collection of essays that outline the recent work on ecology, political theology, religion, and philosophy by one of the leading theologians of our age.

As we face relentless ecological destruction spiraling around a planet of unconstrained capitalism and democratic failure, what matters most? How do we get our bearings and direct our priorities in such a terrestrial scenario? Species, race, sex, politics, and economics will increasingly come tangled in the catastrophic trajectory of climate change. With a sense of urgency and of possibility, Catherine Keller’s No Matter What reflects multiple trajectories of planetary crisis. They converge from a point of view formed of the political ecologies of a transdisciplinary theological pluralism. In its work an ancient symbolism of apocalypse deconstructs end-of-the-world narratives, Christian and secular, even as any notion of an all-controlling and good God collapses under the force of internal contradiction. In the place of a once-for-all incarnation, the materiality of unbounded intercarnation, of fragile yet animating relations of mattering earth-bodies, comes into focus.

The essays of No Matter What share the preoccupation with matter characteristic of the so-called new materialism. They also root in an older ecotheological tradition, one that has long struggled against the undead legacy of an earth-betraying theology which, with the aid of its white Christian right wing, invests the denigration of matter, its spirit of ＂no matter,＂ in limitless commodification. The fragile alternative Keller outlines here embraces--no matter what--the mattering of the life of the Earth and of all its spirited bodies. These essays, struggling against Christian and secular betrayals of the spirited matter of Earth, work to materialize the still possible planetary healing.

Catherine Keller is the George T. Cobb Professor of Constructive Theology in the Theological School and Graduate Division of Religion of Drew University. She practices theology as a relation between ancient hints of ultimacy and current matters of urgency. She also teaches courses in process, political, and ecological theology. Her most recent book is Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy and Other Last Chances (2021).