RCEH Public Lecture Series - Stefan Skrimshire: Eschatological Imagination in an Age of Extinctions

It is increasingly recognised that ethical and cultural responses to the prospect that humans have triggered the ‘sixth mass extinction’ are shaped by environmental imagination in various ways: how lost or endangered species are mediated and represented, and how these are related to narratives of future planetary loss, including loss of human life. In this talk I will explore some of the insights that can be gained from theological and philosophical debates about eschatological (‘end-time’) imagination in Christian traditions – thinking particularly of their critical ethical functions in the past and present. Hopefully this can spark broader discussion about the future role of theology and religious studies within the environmental humanities.