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And welcome once again to the Midwinter's lectures of 2023 . In this beautiful rainy day. It's always beautiful when it rains in texas ahead of us is a full day of presentations and conversations that we hope will

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provide enough incentive to continue exploring the role of faith and religious communities in today's world. So let's receive what this day has to offer with open minds and with yearning hearts. To start off with this reflection

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, we welcome our curry lecturer, Dr Tim Otisville . Dr Bill is a keen observer of culture and the ways that the christian tradition in general and the scriptures in particular inform our interpretation of contemporary dilemmas.

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I encounter Doctor Bills work while teaching a course at Villanova University on the theology of Otherness and assigning his book, Religion and Its Monsters, a book that was able to make undergraduate students read the whole book

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even when it was a theological text and that's a feat. Tim Otisville is a writer and scholar who explores matters of religion, media and american society. He has published 16 books, including when time is

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short finding our way in the Anthropocene, the basis for today's lecture and the Book of Revelation, a biography for which he won a Public Scholar award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has written

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popular essays on religion bible and media for the new york times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington post, the christian century and the Chronicle of higher education, among others. He's the editor in chief

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of the oxford encyclopedia of the bible and the arts , which was named the best print reference in the humanities by library journal. There are many other things that can be said about Dr Bill and his extensive

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curriculum vita, but that will take from the time that we have to listen to the wisdom of his words. So help me welcoming Dr Bill to the platform of the 2023 cory lectures. All right,

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thank you president. Sorry, I want to say thanks as well to uh mona sant Andrea who's been really, really helpful in in organizing us and corralling us and hosting us and all of those kinds of

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things. Thanks to Dave Jensen, who's been hosting me and picking me up and driving me around. This is my first time in Austin and my first time at the seminary and it's just such a beautiful

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campus. It's really been a joy to, to get to know it and to get to know the drag a little bit. Um, it's an, it's an especially Kirby lane, my new favorite diner

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in Austin been there both mornings so far. Um and it's an honor to be giving the thomas white curry lectures. Um three to my three that I know of, of my teacher mentors have given the

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curry lectures, walter Brueggemann carol newsome and given to who is here today. So great to see you and to catch up. They were all presidents of the society of Biblical literature and I'm afraid I'm going

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to break that, that lineage lineage. I don't see that in my future. And I'm looking forward to uh to uh hearing from and being in conversation with my fellow lecturers, Patrick and Grace. Really

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looking forward to the synergies and emergence is that that happened. Uh Natalie Webb, thank you for your amazing sermon last evening. I have to admit that when the first Corinthian scripture passage was being read,

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I thought ro were on very different pages. But it turns out that wasn't the case. It was a beautiful sermon and I appreciate that. Um so synergies there too. So the overall focus of my

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three talks for the curry lectures is the church of the anthropocene creating space for grief and hope. Um just going to briefly read what I wrote in my little abstract for that. What if it's too late

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to reverse climate collapse? What is our calling on the horizon of a finite human future? Our task is to find new ways of creating space, to confront our denial of death as a species with the

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reality of the bed we've made for ourselves to grieve . What must be grieved and to find deep hope as opposed to shallow optimism for a humbler but more meaningful future. I think this is the new prophetic

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and pastoral calling of the church and other other religious communities and that's what I want to talk about. So, this morning, this first of the three talks, I'll kind of have one ft in the

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book that just came out when time is short finding our way in the anthropocene, which kind of sets up for where I want to go in these lectures . And then I'll be stepping past that book as

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we as we move along. I'll read a little , I'll talk a little and and hopefully there'll be some time for for conversations and to think together about what might be the role, What may be the

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calling of churches and other religious communities on this unprecedented horizon that we're facing. I'm excited for this opportunity to give a talk in a seminary and ministry and theological education context. My own context is a secular

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university. We like to say we don't do religion , we study people who do religion, we don't talk about God, we study people who talk about God. And yet, you know, I'm very

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much ministry and seminary adjacent I went to Columbia Theological Seminary and other presbyterian seminary. I'm married to a presbyterian minister. So yes, I am a pastor's wife and my our daughter Sophie just finished her m

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div and is pursuing ordination in the presbyterian church. So I'm taking this very seriously as a work in progress, opportunity for me and want to stretch myself and I look forward to learning from you all.

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So, first defining a term and then three elevator speeches about the book. The term obviously is anthropocene . I'll talk more about that um shortly but short definition of anthropocene is it is the new planetary era

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that we are in. It is the geological era that follows the Holocene. And it is the first geological era in which human behavior and action are the prey primary forces of change in terms of our ecological

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planetary system. More on that. Shortly three elevator speeches, I always tell my students that they need to work on their elevator speeches, whether it's a grant or an invention or something they're writing or whatever

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you need to have, like something that you can make a pitch in the time it takes on an elevator ride. If that person you want to make that pitch to happens to be on the elevator with

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you. And so I've got three, I've got a short one which is three floors. I've got a shorter one, which is two floors and I've got the shortest one, which is a one floor

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elevator speech. So the three floor short one for this book is that it is a book about our denial of death as a species, how religion has contributed to that denial and how religion might also be

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a resource for breaking through that denial and finding real deep hope on the horizon of a finite human future . The shorter to floor version is this is not another before. It's too late book. This is

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a what if it's already too late book? Maybe it's not. But what if it is shouldn't we be talking about that too? And then the shortest one floor speech elevator speech is that it's about a

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palliative approach to the human future. So I'll talk more about that too. Um I want to begin by reading a little bit from a story, reading a story that I tell in the book, It's

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about our daughter. Um and I'll dive in. My first job after graduate school was as a professor at a small presbyterian by the way, liberal arts college in ST Petersburg florida. I grew up in

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Alaska and my wife Clover was from the pacific northwest . So florida felt like another planet to us. But the school was a wonderful place to begin our careers myself as a professor and she as a,

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as a chaplain. This was the mid 19 nineties , but it felt like the sixties there, it was the kind of place where classes were as likely to meet on the beach or in a palm frond

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did sweat lodge, which was a senior project turned sacred space on campus as in the scheduled room where the smell of we weed and patchouli oil. We're always in the air and where class guests often included

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a pet dog or ferret or snake, open pet policy. We love the school's quirky, free and easy sense of community and its dedication to education as transformation and liberation during our first year there, I

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would often bring our four year old daughter Sophie to class with me. I like to sit on the table in front of the chalkboard while teaching and she liked to hunker down underneath it with some crayons and

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paper peeking out between my dangling feet at the students while drawing pictures that she would give to anyone who seemed interested at the end of class. Sometimes while we walked back to my office or to a nearby

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diner for a late breakfast, she would comment on the class discussion or tell me about a conversation she had with a student. She was possessed of a disarming sense of assurance about how she saw herself and

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her surroundings and she spoke easily and fearlessly from that place. After a session on religion and gender, she reported that I told Cindy that I know I shouldn't like Disney movies because the girl is only happy

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when she gets saved by the boy but I like them Anyway. After a class on apocalyptic movement, she said, I told Gunner that you like to make creepy things interesting. That was my monster's days

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Jose one typically sunny afternoon. We were driving home from school along a beautiful tree lined boulevard clover and I were in the front of our red Subaru wagon and Sophie and her baby brother Seth were in car

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seats in the back, we passed a playground in a big public park where kids were swinging and sliding and climbing things while parents were watched attentively from nearby park benches, I could see Sophie in the rear

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view mirror happily taking in the huge live oaks, the blue sky, the green grass, the frolicking Children Soon, she said, all of this will be gone, clover and I glanced at one another

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as if to ask, did she just say what I think she said. Perhaps that class session on apocalyptic schism had shaped her imagination more than I'd realized . Or maybe she had just heard one of our

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favorite songs pets by the band porno for pyros on the car radio. It's this childlike, happy go lucky tune about how we're just like the dinosaurs. Only we are doing ourselves in much faster than they

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ever could well make great pets perhaps. But I don't think so. Rather, I think that something in the happiness and simple beauty of the moment awakened along with it a sense, even a vision of

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the fleeting nous, of all that we know and love. I wonder do kids have that sense more than we adults do? What if growing up is about learning to forget that uneasy, half conscious knowledge

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of the unbearable precariousness of being human in a here today, gone tomorrow world. Maybe over the years we gradually learn to deny such mortal unease, building moments of experience into a big story, a story

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of where we've been and where we're going. Which provides a kind of narrative bridge to block our view of the abyss. We daily cross. Sophie was right, of course everything we were taking in as

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we drove along that day is now, in a very real sense, gone. The trees have grown older or died as have the kids and parents and grandparents. The playground has rusted, broken down,

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been replaced and the gulf coast city of ST Petersburg itself could easily be pretty much gone soon enough, bordered by water on three sides. Its highest elevation is a mere 44 ft above sea level. Much

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of the city including that park we were driving past is not even 10 ft above sea level during our first year. There, Sophie had already seen heavy rains turn our neighborhood street and back allie into muddy

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rivers populated by floating dumpsters, coolers and palm fronds . She had seen floodwaters reach the door handles of our car in the driveway and fill the coin slots of parking meters in the nearby town of Saint Pete

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beach. When you see flooding like that, even just for a day or two, it is not difficult to imagine water washing the world away as we know it soon. All of this will be gone

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. It may not be too late, but it could well be not long ago. Back in the 1980s, it probably was not too late. There were opportunities to slow stop. Perhaps even reverse global

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warming. There was the 1978 report to the United States Department of Energy by a group of prominent scientists known as the Jasons. They warned that carbon dioxide emissions would be doubled from pre industrial levels by 2035

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raising global temperatures by as much as 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit . This they believed would cause a rapid melting of the poles, triggering massive forest fires and catastrophic water shortages, turning much of North America into dust bowls

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. That was 1978. Then there was the study on climate change by a committee on the National Academy of the National Academy of Sciences, commissioned in 1979 by the Carter administration, but not released until 1983

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under the Reagan administration. Although the report itself was bleak, largely confirming the Jason's report and calling for immediate action. The committee's chair and spokesperson, William Nierenberg, along with President Reagan's science advisor George Keyword

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played down its urgency and stopped short of making any serious policy changes. Climate scientists had long warned that by the time we had clear signs of the warming effects of carbon dioxide emissions, it would be too

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late to do anything about them. Then in 1988 , it happened the hottest summer on earth in 130 years of recorded history. In June of that year , James Hansen Dr. James Hansen, director of

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NASA's Institute for Space Studies, testified before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that the greenhouse effect of global warming caused by the build up of carbon dioxide and other gasses through human activities was a reality and

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would raise temperatures by as much as 9°F by 2050 , if not sooner. The rate of warming moreover would probably not be steady and gradual. Widespread deforestation , for example, could speed it up as dying

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trees release their stored carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Senator timothy Wirth of colorado, who presided over the hearing said the scientific evidence is compelling Now. The Congress must begin to consider how we are going to

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slow or halt that warming trend And how we are going to cope with the changes that may already be inevitable, 1988. But even then in the summer of 1988, more than a third of a century

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ago, it was not only already inevitable, it was probably already too late to do more than moderately slow the warming trend. And encourage you to have a look at a book by William Caton called overshoot

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. If you've never heard of it, take a look at it. He wrote it around that same time and he did the math and at that time we were living the we on this planet were living

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on the natural resources of about 10 earths. Who knows how many earths we're using now, but 10 earths back in the 19 eighties in a matter of decades, coastal cities like ST Petersburg, Miami Hong

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kong London could be underwater. The world's icecaps are melting rapidly many times faster than 100 years ago and the sea level is rising eventually it could swell to more than 200 by more than 200 ft, swallowing

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up much of the world's human habitat and raising global temperatures to inhuman heights. No one knows how long that will take. Maybe hundreds of years, maybe a couple 100 maybe with a couple of big tipping

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points by the end of the century. And that's just one of several realistic ways our environment could wash or blow us away. Other plausible scenarios include global pandemics, asteroid showers and volcanic winters, to name

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a few. Not that the world would miss us , it would be just fine without us, countless plants and animals would continue to thrive and team new forms of life would emerge and evolve. A vibrant

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and diverse post human planet is a very real possibility Indeed, sooner or later it is an inevitable and inevitability. The end of the world as we know it. That is as a home for human life

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and society in any form that remotely resembles anything we have known, looms on the horizon, but we have an incredibly hard time thinking that imagining that it's as if we think there's some invisible safety net out

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there, we may get pretty far down the road to self destruction, but we'll figure things out in time. We can engineer our way out of anything . We always do As the hero, Mark Watney

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played by Matt Damon and the puts it in that film, The martian we'll just have to science the out of this, which is exactly what Mark and his nasa colleagues keep doing throughout the movie. All

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the way to the final scene in which he explains to his future, space traveling students that when all hope of survival seems lost, you can either accept that or you can get to work, you do

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the math, you solve one problem and you solve the next one and then the next and if you solve enough problems, you get to come home, we can science our way out of anything we seem

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to believe. So that's where this book, this book, when time is short goes, it's about our denial of death as a species. It's also about how religion, especially Christianity has fueled that denial

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, and how religion might offer resources to help break through that denial to live into our finite human future in a more humble, mindful and meaningful way. When I tell friends that I've written a book about

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our denial of death as a species, they sometimes think that what I mean is that it's a book about our denial as a species of death, that it's about how we humans tend to live in denial

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of our own mortality. There's a great book on that subject, Ernest Becker's the denial of death, which won the 1974 Pulitzer prize for general nonfiction two months after, by the way, Becker himself died

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of colon cancer. And that book has a huge influence on my book, but that's not exactly what this book is about. When I say our denial of death as a species. I'm not only talking

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about our denial as a species of mortality, but also and especially our denial of the mortality, infinite tude of our species, our denial of the very real and imminent possibility of human extinction. I want

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to explore on the species level, what Becker was exploring on the individual level. What if it's already too late, Too slow, let alone stop. Let alone reverse climate change? Maybe it's not.

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I hope it's not and we all should be doing all that we can so that it's not still what if it is, What if we, along with many other play, Hansen animals have 50 years or

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200 years or maybe even several 100 more years left . What if we consider even for a moment that our faith in ourselves to engineer or science and tech are way out of this is unreliable, perhaps even

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delusional. What, then? How should we live ? Only lately, have some started to acknowledge the very real possibility that humankind will literally wear out its welcome on the planet. There have been five great

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extinction events on earth. This would be the sixth and the only one brought about by those being extinguished on this horizon. New and appreciate the chuckle on this horizon. New and emerging voices in science,

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Philosophy, religion and art are inviting us sometimes pushing us to imagine a post human world we are being called to recognize our place in history in terms of the era of the anthropocene. This term anthropocene was

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coined in the year 2000. In recognition of the fact that we are now living in a world in which anthropogenic, that is human originating forces have as much or more impact on the planet's ecological and geological

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systems as non human forces do, scholars debate exactly when the anthropocene officially succeeded the holocene as the Earth's new geological era. Some say it was at the dawn of capitalism and european colonial expansion during the 17th

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century. Others say it started with the industrial revolution and the invention of the steam engine in the 18th century. Most including a team of scientists called the anthropocene working group, say it began around 1945 with

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the first atomic bombs and what we now call the great acceleration, which was marked by unprecedented alterations to earth the earth's biological and hydrological systems brought about by exponential population growth and the global rise of large scale

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industrial societies. A quick Internet image search for the phrase great acceleration, I encourage you to do that will pull up a host of graphs that powerfully ill . This rapid acceleration beginning in the middle of the

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20th century, from urban populations to gross domestic products from great floods per decade to deforestation from international travel activity to the number of McDonald's restaurants, there are in the world and everyone of the grass goes like

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that at the middle of the 20th century, millions of years from now. The geological evidence marking this new era will be the strata. Graphic signatures, the signatures in the strategic graffiti that we leave behind

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and guess what they will be. It won't be cathedrals and great artworks and music. It will be huge deposits of concrete, plastic, carbon and nuclear fallout. Such will be our geological legacy, our

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signature layer on the planet. Whenever the anthropocene officially began, we are now in it. And there is no going back. Not only does this fact push us to recognize that we humans are now the

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primary cause of geological and ecological change, including climate change. It also has the potential to remind us that there was something before us and there will be something after us. In fact, although we are

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responsible for the anthropocene, it will outlast us. We will continue to affect the planet long after the last humans are gone, recognizing that we are now living in the anthropocene then invites us to reflect on

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a post human, eventually post anthropocene future for the planet. And why is that so hard for us to conceive so easy to deny, why is it nearly impossible to imagine a world without us a thriving

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post human creation and I use that word creation intentionally in this theological context. A big part of the drive today, I believe is religious of that drive to deny is religious by religious, I mean,

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a specific, highly distilled form of modern Western christian theology, one that is rooted in a couple bible verses taken out of context. It is the theology of what I call and others call human exceptionalism.

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This is the idea or rather the belief in our God like Dominion over the natural world as humans, that humankind is exceptional to the rest of creation and accepted from the realities that the rest of creation is

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subject to. Human exceptionalism is our origin story, the founding myth of the modern West. It is also the unacknowledged, little understood yet fundamental sustaining faith that fuels global capitalism whose anthropocene centric dream of infinite

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growth through extraction, is driving and drilling us to an early extinction. It unfolds more over into other , more specific exceptional ISMs including european exceptionalism, christian exceptionalism, White exceptionalism cis male exceptionalism and of course

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, american exceptionalism to name a few revealing ways in which our ecological crisis is entangled with our crisis of democracy. As I argue in the book at some length, this religion of godlike human exceptionalism is a

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modern invention. However biblical or christian, it claims to be this worldview would have been alien and unbelievable to the traditions and perspectives of those people that considers its ancestors. I want to recover in the book

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. I do a lot of work around this and we'll talk about it in the afternoon to, I want to recover those earlier traditions and perspectives in biblical tradition as well as traces of even earlier indigenous religious

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cultures behind them in. So doing I hope to unread them from the perspective of the Dominion delusion they've been forced to serve and to reread them for what insights they might have to offer us today, far

00:28:22.010 - 00:28:37.080

from promoting godlike human exceptionalism. Many of these traditions I believe are closer to what buddhist poet and environmental philosopher activist Gary Snyder calls the practice of the wild something Natalie was talking about last night too, Than

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they than they are close to modern Christianity. This is largely because modern Christianity has taken such great pains to try to distance its inherited traditions from other so called primitive or indigenous religions and we need to recover

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those connections. So I wrote this book in conversation with my students and also with my own kids who are now young adults that four year old is now 31. Um, uh, and, and,

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and, and there's I think is a, we all feel weary and discouraged, right? But I think there's is a, a weariness that is really infused with frustration and even rage, sick and tired

00:29:21.650 - 00:29:33.700

, they've grown up fully aware and terrified of the ecological crisis they find themselves in. For many of them anxiety and climate trauma are a part of everyday life. This is a whole new field in psychology

00:29:33.700 - 00:29:47.500

and psychiatry, climate grief, climate trauma. They have heard the deadlines come and go for the point at which it will be too late to reverse or even significantly slow global warming. They have heard leader

00:29:47.500 - 00:30:02.990

after leader of every political and religious stripe promised to address it and then fail to do so. They do not easily imagine or anticipate grandchildren, let alone great grandchildren as my generation and earlier ones did.

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Indeed, many cannot imagine having kids of their own . These young people also recognize the denial that has gotten us to this point. They see it in their own parents and grandparents, not to mention professors

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and they worry that in time they themselves will learn to practice that same denial. I first tried to write this book that I finished now as a letter to my own Children. At one point, as

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a letter to Sophie's granddaughter who I imagined and then as a letter to my own students, a kind of long form conversation with them I guess, but that didn't really make sense. It's not something I'm

00:30:42.940 - 00:30:56.920

telling them or writing to them rather, it's something I've been thinking and talking about with them and with people like you, I wrote this book as a continuation, a kind of next round of those conversations

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which I want to continue today and tomorrow conversations for which I continue to be grateful for and in which I continue to find hope to begin not with delusions of God likeness and human transcendence, but with a

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call to sub sentence that is a call to ground ourselves in what I call our earth creature leanness more about that later to find ourselves in with and under the web of interdependence that cradles are being so the

00:31:29.420 - 00:31:40.640

shape of this conversation for me, as I as I would like to try to kind of host it and invite you all into it. And it's the shape of the book too. I draw from my

00:31:40.640 - 00:31:53.140

teacher Walter Brueggemann, his book, prophetic imagination. And then, more recently, one that was a lot easier read than prophetic imagination. But making a similar article argument called reality grief, hope. And

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basically, what Brueggemann argues is that the profits are really first and foremost artists. What they are doing is they are offering an alternative world and our alternative future over against that of the Empire. And in

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that context, he's thinking about the solomonic Empire, but that that what they offer is reality over against the ideology that the empire is putting forward, which he calls Israelite exceptionalism in that ancient context. So

00:32:23.320 - 00:32:45.270

, reality over against ideology. What's really happening versus that ideology um to confront that, to confront uh the the denial that the Empire um takes on when that ideology begins to fail with grief to to to

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to offer grief against denial and then to offer hope real hope over against the despair which inevitably follows follows the denial. So reality against ideology um grief against denial and hope against despair and that's the same shape

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as I think the conversation we need to have the reality um, of the bed we have made for ourselves confronting that ideology of human exceptionalism with that actual reality to to grieve the harm that has been caused

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, The harm that will all that's already baked in , that we're going to see, to to confront the denial with that grief. And finally, to find real hope over against the despair that inevitably falls

00:33:31.780 - 00:33:44.380

follows from from grief. And um, I mean from denial. So, I one of the things I really want to make clear is that there really is no hope. I don't think without grief without

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moving through grief, we can't be afraid of grief . And I know you all get this, I'm preaching to the choir here can't get too real hope without moving through grief and hope is not optimism.

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Sometimes when I tell people this is not before, it's too late book. And so what if it's already too late book? The response I hear is for many of my colleagues, actually, university colleagues

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to, well, I choose to be optimistic and to me what I hear in that is I don't want to talk about it. That's that's just an expression of denial, I think, and I've thought

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a lot about the difference between hope and optimism. I hope we can continue to think about that hope is deep. Optimism is shallow and is easily swept away. Hope is costly. Optimism is cheap,

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it's an addictive quick high and leaves us with a terrible hangover in the morning. Still for me, hope must be, in some sense, palliative in health care for individuals. A palliative approach is not

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about giving up on the struggle to stay alive. It's not the same as what we often mean. For example, by hospice and I want to be clear, it's not about turning up the morphine drip

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and anesthetizing our anxiety and pain. It's in fact quite the opposite of that. I am not a doom er when I'm proposing this kind of approach, it's about a palliative approach to the human in health

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care is about breaking through one's denial of fin itude and accepting that death is a normal part of one's life. It's about prioritizing quality of life over quantity of days or years alive? It's about learning to

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live with necessary pain and suffering and at least as importantly alleviating unnecessary suffering. It's about asking what matters most when one realizes that barring some kind of miracle one's time is growing short. So what might a

00:35:40.750 - 00:35:54.470

palliative approach to the human future look like to be sure this is not a direct application, It doesn't translate directly among other things. We're talking about very different scales right. It's not a palliative approach to

00:35:54.470 - 00:36:10.590

an individual, but to society to humankind. It's not about days or months or even years, but about decades or generations or even maybe centuries still. How might the wisdom of palliative care for individuals be

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instructive for us as we try to create space to move through and between reality grief and hope on the horizon of a finite human future? What might it mean to face our collective mortality as part of our

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story? Part of what it means to be human ? How in some cases might that change our goals and priorities as individuals and as communities, locally and globally? How in other cases might it increase our

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commitment to present to present goals and priorities? How is our denial of our collective Fin Itude actually causing more suffering and violence in our communities and in our world? What would it mean in the face of

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our collective Fin Itude to work to alleviate unnecessary suffering and to offer and find forgiveness, reconciliation, reparation to work toward justice in our relationships and our institutions , whether we have a generation or seven generations or

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even longer. These are the questions that I think are worth worth asking and talking about now, and I'm going to stop there. But just to say that's sort of, you know, mostly my foot

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in that last book. But where I want to go is is to really be asking, you know , what, what can we as religious communities? What can we be doing in this context? Is

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there something are there things that are there are there are there resources that we have practices that we have perspectives that we have that we can draw on to create different kinds of spaces in our world today?

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To move through and between reality, grief and hope . So that's really what I'm hoping that we'll do next time I'm going to talk about composting Christianity, I'll just leave you to think about what that might

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mean. And and then in the final one, I really want to think about about models for for what it might, what it might be to organize and build community around around this. So thank you