April 19, 2023
7:30pm EST
Union Theological Seminary
3041 Broadway
New York, NY
On Wednesday April 19 from 7:30-9:00pm ET, Join Professor of Theology and World Religions at Union Theological Seminary the Rev. Dr. John Thatamanil and Christiana Zenner for an in-person conversation entitled “Swipe Left? The Anthropocene in Anti-Colonial Feminist Perspective”.
From the New York Times to the Economist and the Journal of Quaternary Stratigraphy, the “Anthropocene” has been proposed as the current geological epoch, in which humans are named as a decisive planetary force. Geology, this lecture argues, has quite a bit to do with theology. Unfortunately, in most iterations the deployment of the “Anthropocene” idea and its proxy of “climate crisis” does little to name the racialized, political economic, and theological imaginaries and colonial histories that have generated the massive eco-social degradations that are said to characterize this epoch. This talk both deconstructs the conceits of scientific modernity (geology, in particular) and its colonial knowledge-making apparatus, while pointing an anti-colonial, anti-racist way forward.