We can neither ignore the devastating implications of the national election nor let it define our shared future. Drawing on her new book, No Matter What, Keller will consider with us how to resist, insist and persist with our Christian commitment to an ecosocially just co-existence upon a renewed Earth.
Based on Dr. Keller's latest book, "NO MATTER WHAT: Crisis and the Spirit of Planetary Possibility."
As we face relentless ecological destruction spiraling around a planet of unconstrained capitalism and democratic failure, what matters most? How do we get our bearings and direct our priorities in such a terrestrial scenario? Species, race, sex, politics, and economics will increasingly come tangled in the catastrophic trajectory of climate change. With a sense of urgency and of possibility, Catherine Keller’s No Matter What reflects multiple trajectories of planetary crisis. They converge from a point of view formed of the political ecologies of a transdisciplinary theological pluralism. In its work an ancient symbolism of apocalypse deconstructs end-of-the-world narratives, Christian and secular, even as any notion of an all-controlling and good God collapses under the force of internal contradiction. In the place of a once-for-all incarnation, the materiality of unbounded intercarnation, of fragile yet animating relations of mattering earth-bodies, comes into focus.
The essays of No Matter What share the preoccupation with matter characteristic of the so-called new materialism. They also root in an older ecotheological tradition, one that has long struggled against the undead legacy of an earth-betraying theology that, with the aid of its white Christian rightwing, invests the denigration of matter, its spirit of “no matter,” in limitless commodification. The fragile alternative Keller outlines here embraces―no matter what―the mattering of the life of the Earth and of all its spirited bodies. These essays, struggling against Christian and secular betrayals of the spirited matter of Earth, work to materialize the still possible planetary healing.
Renowned Westar scholar John D. Caputo writes, "A riveting collection by the leading theologian in the USA today, magisterial in scope, iridescent in style, Keller ranges over matters that matter, theological, ecological, and political, a tour de force on everything from process thought, postmodern theory, and feminism to climate change and the war in Ukraine. Everything we expect from Catherine Keller. This is exactly what theology should look like today."---John D. Caputo, Thomas J. Watson Professor Emeritus of Religion, Syracuse University, and author of What to Believe? Twelve Brief Lessons in Radical Theology
2025 Westar Conference keynote speaker Gary Dorrien writes, "Catherine Keller is a theologian who does not write about the prospects of Christianity or theology. She writes luminous, theopoetic, brilliantly astute essays and books about entanglement, eco-apocalypse, racial capitalism, divine weakness, and creative becoming. No Matter What is vintage Keller at her liveliest."---Gary Dorrien, author of In a Post-Hegelian Spirit: Philosophical Theology as Idealistic Discontent
Power and Idolatry in America
Power and Idolatry in America
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