Animals
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As a follow-up of sorts to my reading of Christopher Southgate’s The Groaning of Creation, I picked up Jay McDaniel’s Of God and Pelicans: A Theology of Reverence for Life, which Southgate refers to a number of times in his book. McDaniel is a process theologian who has also been influenced by feminist theology, as Read more
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As a wrap-up to this series, I thought I’d offer some concluding thoughts on Christopher Southgate’s The Groaning of Creation. Just to briefly review: the problem of animal theodicy as Southgate sees it is that the evolutionary process seems to grind so many sentient creatures under its wheels and to doom so many species to Read more
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Throughout this series we’ve seen two intertwining themes. First, death and suffering are necessary parts of the process–perhaps the only possible process–by which finite selves are brought into existence. Second, however, this process involves the (seemingly) permanent thwarting of many of those selves as well as the disappearance of entire ways of being (species). And Read more
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We saw in the previous post that Southgate thinks humans should play an active role in “healing” the creation by ameliorating some of the negative effects of the evolutionary process. And we’ve also seen that chief among those effects, in his view, are the problem of animal suffering and the problem of extinction. Turning to Read more
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Having offered an account of why God permits the suffering and frustated lives of so many non-human animals, Southgate turns to the question of what role humans might play in alleviating their plight. Key to his understanding once again is the notion of creation in travail, or “groaning.” Creation is good, but it’s destined to Read more
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As we saw in the previous post, Southgate affirms some kind of afterlife as an eschatological recompense for non-human animals who were deprived of the opportunity to flourish in this life, a strategy taken by many theodicies that focus on human suffering. But, as Southgate recognizes (and as we’ve discussed here before), “if an altered Read more
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In Chapter 5, Southgate directly takes up the question of an afterlife for non-human animals. This is another main plank in his evolutionary theodicy, alongside the “only way” argument. Even given that the evolutionary process is necessary to give rise to the values of finite creatures, countless animals still lead lives best described in Hobbes’ Read more
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In Chapter 4, Southgate develops a trinitarian “theology of creation,” an admittedly speculative enterprise that seeks to shine some light on the relationship between the triune God and an evolutionary process that operates according to Darwinian principles. Taking up the theme of kenosis, Southgate suggests that God’s self-emptying love is foundational both to intra-trinitarian relationships Read more
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I don’t know what I think of the idea, but this is the most interesting thing I’ve read in a while. (In other words, it’s not about the election.) “Re-wilding,” in the words of one of the scientists interviewed, is the “super-colliding superconducting experiment of ecology.” Read more
A Thinking Reed 