Michael Shermer accurately summarizes our argument, and his review of our book is fair if not downright magnanimous. At one point, he even appears to concede that, strictly speaking, we cannot get an “ought from an is”—that science by itself cannot discover moral truths. If this is what he thinks, then Shermer and we seem…

It is safe to say that Plundering Eden is an exercise of the imagination. I, of course, do not practice what I preach to a degree I would desire. I am honored and humbled to have this conversation around my book by such excellent scholars. Response to Brian Brock I am grateful for Brian Brock’s…

Plundering Eden is not a boring book, either in its rhetoric or its substance. Wagenfuhr addresses his audience with forthright statements and forceful assertions, which serve to undergird his powerful ethical challenge. The problem the book addresses is both empirical and ideological. Problems, Empirical and Ideological Wagenfuhr marshals important evidence to show that human interaction…

The author of Plundering Eden is passionate about the need to wake up to a new way of perceiving the dire state we are in ecologically and what Christians, especially those committed to evangelical traditions, need to do about it. In keeping with the intent of this symposium series, I am not going to summarize…

Plundering Eden is disturbing in all the right ways. True to the book’s subtitle, Wagenfuhr is “subversive” in his critique of human progress and institutions. Looking to technological and political policies to solve our ecological destruction of life and habitats on Earth is delusional, because our technology and policies are themselves problematic, extensions of our…

In the 2020 documentary My Octopus Teacher, filmmaker Craig Foster offers us a vivid account of a human undergoing a process of recovering from the depredations of overly managed, hyper productive modernity under the tutelage of a tiny octopus. Foster lives on the ocean, in the western cape of South Africa. After burning out in…

G. P. Wagenfuhr serves as Theology Coordinator for ECO: A Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians. Plundering Eden (2020) is a follow-up to his earlier book, Plundering Egypt: A Subversive Christian Ethic of Economy (2016). The subtitles for both books describe them as “subversive.” Even a casual reading of Plundering Eden reveals this description to be…

The classical doctrine of creation has suffered much since the twentieth century. While Bruce Ashford and Craig Bartholomew are willing to speak of the “travails and glories” of the doctrine in this period, it is evident that they are concerned with the former. Moltmann’s panentheism and process theology’s notion of a di-polar God, for example,…

Lauren Winner has offered a short but pungent volume on the way central Christian “practices” are historically suffused with distortive, even abusive energies. Focusing specifically on eucharist, prayer, and baptism, she presents an argument that is pointed, deft, often elegant and always enlivened by injections of narrative energy and provocative conceptual summaries. Winner is a…

“If there is no God, Murder Isn’t Wrong” So says the religious conservative radio talk show host and author Dennis Prager in a PragerU video viewed by 4.5 million people. I rebutted Prager in a studio debate hosted by Dave Rubin for his Rubin Report show, in which I made the case that rejecting “Divine…

In an age when the weight of science is held in the balance and the natural order is often held in conflict with biblical belief, the church needs both a robust doctrine of creation and the tools necessary to navigate toward sympathetic conversations. This is the goal of the Henry Center’s Stott Award for Pastoral…

I’ve organized my response into a loose series of comments, appreciations, and questions, as I try to begin to take in Katherine Sonderegger’s extraordinary work in this volume. Here, I will comment on 1) her voice in the project, 2) the vestigia Trinitatis, with sex/gender as an example, and 3) the holiness of the Triune…