Beyond Laudato Si' - by Christiana Zenner

Book Synopsis

Engages with the prehistory and contemporary afterlives of Laudato Si' through critical and constructive engagement with the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences using an intersectional, anti-colonial feminist methodology.

Laudato Si' On Care for Our Common Home, Pope Francis's encyclical on ecology, was addressed to "every person living on the planet" and released in the of summer 2015 to critical skepticism and enthusiastic acclaim. From the professoriate to political pundits, from the apathetic to the atheistic, from Harvard economists to secular Jewish feminist thought leaders, Laudato Si' (LS) got people's attention. It remains the most important legacy of Pope Francis and stands as a historical referent of global moral clarity in a period of ecological degradations, racial capitalism, and widespread social suffering.

Beyond Laudato Si' advances an intersectional feminist, anti-colonial method to explore the LS's prehistory, its claims, its impact, its key contributions, and its recursively freighted concepts. With chapters that chart the trajectory of theology and science in the Catholic Church, the allure of integral ecology, the dangers of gendered theological abuse, and the turn to Indigenous values, Beyond Laudato Si' elegantly charts the intellectual and ethical patterns that emerge and resurface in various theoretical and practical contexts of papal ecotheology. These topics, while not often considered together, reflect larger theological histories and collective behaviors and must be oriented toward integrity in theological reasoning and pursuit of equitable social formations in the present and future.

Characterized by rigorous interdisciplinarity (among the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences) and grounded in an intersectional, anti-colonial feminist viewpoint, Beyond Laudato Si' amplifies and engages key concepts from LS and its afterlives, while also elucidating persistent themes, troubles, and methods in Catholic ecotheology and ethics.

About the Author

Christiana Zenner is Associate Professor of Theology, Science, and Ethics at Fordham University in New York City. An intersectional, anti-colonial feminist working at the intersections of theology, religious studies, and ecologies, Dr. Zenner is the author of Just Water: Theology, Ethics, and Fresh Water Crises (rev. ed. 2018) and co-editor of two volumes on bioethics and sustainability.