Facing Our Future/s Together: Human, Posthuman, & More-Than-Human Animals

In the Hebrew Bible, depictions of famine, flood, and the destruction of civilizations are haunted by the presence of ravens. As Jewish and Christian interpreters read these texts, they found the birds who showed up at these sites of death “good to think with.” They considered ravens as they contemplated the pressures of food scarcity in the story of Elijah or the deaths that follow rising waters in the story of Noah. These ravens were neither simple victims nor passive witnesses to these catastrophic events; instead, like the human characters in these stories, they often played active roles in the devastation. This paper examines places in the history of biblical interpretation in which readers thought with ravens as they read these scenes of ecological destruction or precarity, sometimes seeing ravens as a threat to their own survival and other times as a mirror to the devastating impacts of their own hungers and predations.

Are the sources of modern Jewish thought capable of theorizing a planetary politics? This paper suggests a non-anthropocentric Jewish ecotheology by conceptualizing sacrifice as interspecies transformation. An interpretive tradition developed by medieval and modern Jewish thinkers understands biblical sacrifice as a sacrament symbolizing apotheosis. Unexpectedly, human union with the Divine opens up interspecies possibility. Thinking beyond the human becomes possible because apotheosis is contingent upon the human offerant’s identification with the sacrificial animal. What is the nature of this “identification”? In what ways are human and more-than-human life bound together by their shared materiality? And what is the fate of this materiality? This paper populates an interspecies sacrificial imagination that reworks human-critter relations to reimagine the nature of perfection.  

Behind every horror of genocide, war, or other similar acts of shocking violence are the mental and social frameworks that justify such actions. Among the most potent of these justifications is the language and logic of dehumanization. This paper incorporates social psychological research over the last decade which has demonstrated strong links between perceived Human-Animal division and dehumanizing beliefs towards human out-groups. Critically, this research finds that education about animal-human similarities reduces belief in a strong Human-Animal divide, while also providing the knock-on effect of reducing out-group dehumanization. These insights introduce a key litmus test for theologians: to what degree does the theology under question reinforce rigid (and hierarchical) categorizations between human and animal? This paper concludes by applying this test to common interpretations of the imago Dei, suggesting that even well-intentioned anthropocentric definitions may mistakenly cause harm to all animals, including Homo sapiens.

The politics of our moment lurch toward future(s) of climate disruption, mass extinction, global warfare, and social collapse with louder and louder denunciations, proclamations, and aggrandizements—nihilistic forms of nostalgia. If we recognize, building on Kathryn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, that the apocalyptic roar of “anthropos” rushing headlong toward collapse has long been a voice that relies on un-earthing and burying of “unhuman” others (in both a racialized and speciated sense), perhaps the time has come to imagine a posthuman offramp that places trust in meaningful silences.