I've arrived in Bloomington, Indiana for a conference called "Religious Perspectives and Alternative Futures in an Age of Humans." The somewhat awkward age of humans is a way of referring to the Anthropocene mindful of charge that the term homogenizes a state of affairs for which only some anthropoi are mainly responsible. In any case, I'm excited by the way the conference is framed:
Discourse of the Anthropocene resonates strongly with mythic and religious
genres—declensionist or ascendant storylines; tales of hubris, forbidden knowledge, theodicy
and eschatology—making the Anthropocene ripe for analysis by religion scholars. The
Anthropocene raises religious and ethical questions about how to understand humanity’s place
within planetary evolution, and how to envision the future trajectory of human societies.
Scholarly debates arise over dystopian and utopian visions; whether some human groups bear
greater moral responsibility than others for environmental harms stemming from colonialism,
capitalism, and industrialization; and whether the Anthropocene represents a spiritual
aggrandizement or condemnation of humanity. Our project assumes that these debates about
what it means to be human in an “Age of Humans” fall within the purview of religion,
philosophy, theology, and ethics.
I'm one of thirty-odd presenters, and we have enough time through Sunday to get to know each other at receptions (like the one where I found gingerbread anthropos). In my talk I'll be speculating about how the Book of Job might be read as our consciousness absorbs the significance of the "age of humans," offering these projections as an example of a sort of a semi-scifi "conjectural exegesis" of sacred texts which might help us make sense of what's going on and who we are in it.
