Searching for Speech: Preaching in the Ruins of the Anthropocene

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.