Searching for Speech
Preaching in the Ruins of the Anthropocene
- Preaching & Worship
- Publisher: Cascade Books (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2026
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Publisher's Description
What possibly can be said in a time of enormous wastefulness, mass extinctions, climate change, climate refugees, and greedy consumption of the planet? The Anthropocene is what many scientists are calling the era we have entered in which the impact of humans and our exponential growth rising from colonial and industrial projects shape the future of the entire planet—the “human-dominated epoch.” Pastors, churches, and spiritual communities have a responsibility to speak and to speak truthfully. The majority of Christians in Mainline Protestant, Historically Black Protestant, Evangelical, and Roman Catholic churches have reported hearing few or no sermons addressing climate change and environmental catastrophe. Even fewer Christians have reported speaking about climate change and environmental catastrophe with other Christians. Searching for Speech explores the far-reaching devastations of the Anthropocene in order to cultivate ways of speaking and relating that are transformative in mutually life-giving relationship with the Earth. Sam Codington searches for “the sound of the genuine” in the borderland of San Diego and Tijuana, on Kumeyaay land.
Endorsements (5)
“Here is a robust guide to a homiletics of entanglement that draws careful attention to the centrality of Earth in Scripture and in our lives. Sam Coddington offers readers a profoundly honest approach, replete with rich examples, that begins and ends with the simple acknowledgement of our interdependence with all creation and celebrates in distinctive and particular ways as the world around us invites us to participate in the care and renewal of all forms of life.”
“Sam Codington’s Searching for Speech is a companion for any minister navigating the complexities of ecological crisis and faithful witness. His reflections on grief, entanglement, and transformation resonate deeply with my own journey of learning to walk more gently on the Earth. This book challenged me to rethink not just my sermons, but my relationships—with land, community, and the more-than-human world. It’s a guide for leading with tenderness, truth, and hope.”
“People of all faiths and none carry deep experiences of the sacred in nature, along with growing anxiety about the escalating destruction of the natural world. From within this crucible, Sam Codington offers new ‘language lessons’ that give voice to the pain and fear, the possibility and reconnection that define this moment.”
“In the tradition of Wendell Berry, Sam Codington invites followers of Jesus to take seriously their relationship to the richness of the places they live, and to pay attention to even the tiny miracles of creation, like grass and snails and bees. But Codington locates the places he describes—and all creatures great and small—in the frame of epochal change, the end of the Anthropocene. This makes for a challenging and especially helpful book. His commitment to childlike wonder—in himself and in others—is an inspiration, as are his tips for the practice of preaching in perilous times.”
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