Radical Kinship
A Christian Ecospirituality
- Prayer & Spiritual Formation
- Publisher: Fortress Press (Augsburg Fortress)
- Published: 2024
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Publisher's Description
What does it mean to live in harmony with all of God's creation? How might our spiritual practice contribute to the healing of this place we call home, and to our own healing along the way? Rachel Wheeler offers compelling testimony for the value--and the life-giving power--of "rewilding." For conservationists, rewilding is a strategy of human restraint, of letting the wild enact ecological repair on its own terms. The "wild" is a quality of life beyond the control of the human. For Christians, a rewilding spirituality restores the life-generating and life-sustaining norms in which we were created to dwell. Radical Kinship: A Christian Ecospirituality provides readers with both theoretical foundations for understanding a rewilded Christian spirituality for the twenty-first century and practical strategies for rewilding our own lives. Wheeler brings biblical foundations and the history of Christian spirituality into conversation with environmental ethics, ecopsychology, and ecopoetics. The frameworks she constructs bring Christian spiritual tradition back to its deepest foundations not only as a product of human culture, but as one shaped in large part by Christians in relationship with other-than-human members of the Earth community.
Endorsements (9)
“Praise for Radical Kinship Rewilding Christian spirituality: what does this mean? Rachel Wheeler’s new book invites us deeply into this question and into the radical kinship of our broadest creaturely relations—precisely at (and as) the center of Christian life. This book’s stretch between wide-ranging scholarly engagement and embodied outdoor practices opens a spirituality that reroots us in the life of the world itself. It could not be more timely, more important, more generative.”
“our lives with our convictions about Earth’s current state of emergency. It is a book I will keep next to my reading chair to pick up whenever I need a nudge toward more integrity in how I share life with all my creature kin in the Earth community.”
“Rachel Wheeler has woven together a solid theological foundation for a movement that is rapidly emerging even within the Christian tradition, and the title captures the core of it. With scholarly acumen and relatable storytelling, Wheeler shows how radical kinship is more than a trendy metaphor. Rather, the practice of living in kindred relationship with all other beings is the loom itself that weaves our life together on this planet. Beyond metaphor, beyond stewardship or sustainability, not only does Wheeler draw the threads of wisdom from across disciplines to rewild the Christian story; she also offers practical ways to rewild our daily lives and spiritual practices at a time when nothing is more important.”
“Reading classic Christian spiritual traditions in light of our current planetary crisis and in conversation with contemporary ecopsychology, ecophilosophy, and ecological knowledge, Rachel Wheeler invites us to reimagine our relationship to our planetary home and embrace the radically interrelated intimacy that humans share with the rest of the Earth community. In this book Wheeler outlines the shape of a “kincentric ecospirituality.” This is truly an important book for all who are discerning what and how we are called to be in this new climate for spirituality.”
“A spirited, sobering, and ultimately hopeful meditation on how we might live in greater kinship with all of creation. Compelling in its range of ideas, the book’s artistry carries through its tone: Wheeler’s gentle but urgent voice strikes a chord in our era of anxiety, endangerment, and loss.”
“The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things.”
“within the mesh of the web, Himself woven within it, yet seeing it, seeing it whole. Every sorrow and desolation He saw, and sorrowed in kinship.”
“Our words can be an antidote to human exceptionalism, to unthinking exploitation, an antidote to loneliness, an opening to kinship.”
“Remember you are of the Earth, and with the Earth you will be transformed.”
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