We are running out of time. Such is the sentiment of so many people around the world today. In the face of a multitude of crises, global politics seems to be driven and defined by an overwhelming sense of anxiety and impending apocalypse. Whether it is climate change, increasing political instability, or rapid technological advancements, humanity seems to be barreling toward an uncertain future at best and catastrophe at worst. This panel brings together four scholars to critically reflect on religious perceptions and philosophies of time to explore where we are, where we are headed, and what we can do. Engaging Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, and secularist perspectives, this panel discusses both how dominant theologies of time undergird the present politics, as well as how alternative visions of time can offer individuals and communities a new way of political being and action not dependent on linear, fixed, or progressive time.
If Islamic eschatology invariably predicts the total destruction of the earth, what room does Islamic ethics afford the religious responsibility to presently prevent and mitigate harm? Putting contemporary popular Muslim intellectuals in Egypt with American prison abolitionists, I investigate how non-mainstream eschatological visions of inevitable human-led destruction create communities of ethical practices that shift the focus of political action away from futurity-oriented outcomes to the socio-political demands of the present moment. I consider how the cross-cutting grammar of intention in the work of Egyptian Islamists and US prison abolitionists relocates the temporal struggle against structural evil(s), which decouples the inevitability of finitude from fixed teleologies by accepting the likelihood of the failure, disruption, and incompletion of redress efforts. I consider the potential this move affords for experimentation in democratic, egalitarian, and self-critical ethical communities that do not reproduce the epistemological and political hierarchies of mainstream technological solutions to ecological crises.
Climate change is often identified as an urgent political problem with little done to address it, while other “urgent” problems garner far greater response. What happens when nothing happens in response to urgencies? How can urgency be restored as a motivating political idea—and should it be? This paper interprets Abraham Joshua Heschel’s understanding of the realms of time and space in The Sabbath (1951) to explore the relationship between urgency and climate change. It argues that Heschel’s distinction of time and space can be understood to assert true temporal urgency against what I call material urgencies, the sense of scarcity of finite goods that we often prioritize over and against the possibility of a future together. To recover a politically motivating sense of urgency about climate change, I argue, we must value the scarcity of time more than the scarcity of things and learn to see the difference between them.
The stories we consume about technology and AI have real-world consequences for how we develop and employ this technology. The dominant narratives of our technological predicament––techno-optimism and techno-pessimism––are both manifestations of a primarily Christian worldview that has previously informed American narratives of progress and history. Drawing from different critical theory, this presentation highlights issues at stake in the development of AI, including the stratification of social inequalities and environmental impact. I propose an alternative ethical orientation to technology, one rooted in Buddhist theories of cyclical time, interdependence, and the bodhisattva ethos.
It has become increasingly alluring to refer to the future of unabated climate change as a climate crisis, an apocalypse. In reaction to the rise of 'climate doomerism,' a peculiar faction has emerged within ecological discourse: ecomodernism. Ecomodernists argue that the limitlessness of human potential opens up a new world of possibility, wherein humanity is completely untethered from the material limits of our planet and energy is cheap, clean, and abundant for all. Drawing from queer ecology, decolonial thought, and critical secularism studies, this paper posits that the transcendent view of humanity lauded by ecomodernists represents the dominant secular eschatology of environmental thought. Engaging the work of Delf Rothe, Chris Methmann, and Ben Jones, I outline the secular eschatological views of ecomodernists and analyze the particular role of technology in ecomodernism. For ecomodernists, technology is the medium of salvation and liberation from human material finitude.