There's a conference in May on religion and the Anthropocene! I've submitted a proposal for a paper. It would be a perfect occasion to present my thinking about the Book of Job in the Anthropocene...Tweaking the proposal (300 word abstract, 800 word description of arguments, methods and sources), I found myself making a new argument. (This often happens to me, part of why writing is such a drag; when I revise something it changes, though not always for the worse.)
In the “age of humans,” the Book of Job may be valued as a guide to the importance of better relations between humans and the rest of what is, as well as with each other. That human beings are never mentioned in the theophany (although the fearsome beasts Behemoth and Leviathan are) will resonate with the experience that Isabelle Stengers calls the “intrusion of Gaia.” Yet here Gaia is reaching out to humanity after all, or at least addressing us across the breakdown of our efforts at understanding. Perhaps the Book of Job will become the foundation again for an apophatic theism. It will in any case direct us to a restoration of earthly bonds: Job’s relationship with his friends is, at God’s urging, the first part of his life to be restored. And, given what Job has learned of the more-than-human, surely not just human bonds. A part of the story’s end which has particularly rankled modern readers is the disconcerting suggestion that Job’s dead children can be replaced. In the Anthropocene all know that what is lost cannot be brought back. The folktale return-to-start of the Book of Job will be dismissed, the lesson in Job’s new life found in its unfamiliar newness. Job’s acceptance of a new terrestrial family, while holding the memory of the lost, will be seen to demonstrate the necessity of “making kin” – perhaps in Donna Haraway’s most radical sense – in the face of cascading extinctions.
(The pic above, from Buck Denver's "What's in the Bible," is for coloring! But where o where have they put Job's wife?)
