Eco-Theological Imagination Amid Collapse: Engaging Ecological Futures and Climate Collapse from the Pulpit

Current preaching often avoids the climate crisis or offers inadequate "creation care" rhetoric. This proposal offers a framework for homiletical growth through three critical practices: cultivating ecological relationality, developing futurist orientations in our preaching, and engaging in trauma-informed homiletical praxis. By dismantling the "resource" mindset in relation to the earth in favor of a web-of-life relationality, preachers can foster deeper kinship among congregations with the more-than-human world. By cultivating anticipatory views of potential futures, sermons can move beyond mere diagnosis toward cultivating communal courage and risk-taking toward those futures. Finally, by embracing and making generative space for eco-emotions — grief, anger,  fear, and even despair — as elements of a practiced hope, faith communities can navigate catastrophe with a sense of resistance to the forces behind that catastrophe and the collective efficacy of communal engagement with the realities that the catastrophe is bringing into our lives and planetary community.