| abstract |
This dissertation responds to the ongoing climate crises by taking up Pope Francis's call for ecological conversion to address its root causes. Drawing on compost as process, metaphor, and muse, the ecological work of religious women, and persisting theological insights of Roman Catholic sacramental tradition, the dissertation explores how sacramental theology can inform embodied pedagogies for collective ecological flourishing.
Chapter one introduces the ethical demands of the Anthropocene and proposes four key interventions: addressing human hubris, acknowledging harms of colonialism and capitalism, recognizing matter's agentive capacities, and attending to the existential cost of ecological devastation. These interventions frame an exploration of alternate epochal names—the Chthulucene, Capitalocene, and New Climatic Regime—through a theological lens shaped by feminist insights on naming.
Chapter two argues that ethically navigating ecological crisis requires the use of multiple names and frameworks. Grounded in Catholic Social Teaching, the spirit of Vatican II, and Francis's encyclical, Laudato si', the chapter develops a vision of sacramental and theological "composting" that addresses what Pope Francis identifies as the evils of global wealth inequality and anthropogenic climate change. It seeks to support development of an integral ecology and the universal destination of all goods.
Chapter three turns to Roman Catholic inheritances—cosmological, metaphysical, and sacramental—as a theological compost heap. Recognizing both toxic and restorative elements of the heap, this chapter seeks reclamation through engagement with the tradition's contested entanglements.
Chapter four critically examines sacramental pedagogy during the thirteenth and the twentieth centuries. The chapter attends to operative dynamics of "tradition" as theological authority. By engaging feminist theology and Thomas Aquinas, read through Mark D. Jordan, it explores the embodied dimensions of sacramental life and its implications for contemporary pedagogy.
Chapter five reframes sacramental causality in light of post-Newtonian physics. Drawing on Karen Barad, it reconceives sacraments as apparatuses—material-discursive practices that enable relational transformation and intra-action—to suggest a more ecologically responsive theology of sacramentality.
Chapter six, finally, extends the dissertation beyond Catholicism, explicating Walt Whitman's poem "This Compost" as a model for ecological attunement. Whitman's poetic vision offers affective pedagogical tools for facing climate injustice in and through theological educational.
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