It may be argued that one result of the merging of Christianity with imperialism in the Middle Ages was a focus on the world beyond this one, “salvation” regarded in heavenly terms, increasingly distant from Jesus’ insistence on the urgency of justice for the exploited in the here and now. The ecotheology movement seeks to reverse the destructive effects of a Western Christian paradigm that sees the earth's resources as vehicles for human consumption; Pope Francis notes this in his encyclical Laudato Si’: “The harmony between the Creator, humanity and creation as a whole was disrupted by our presuming to take the place of God and refusing to acknowledge our creaturely limitations” (§66). Catherine Wright's recent contribution to this movement is rich in historical, narrative, scientific, and spiritual insight, urging Christians to take seriously the recognition that all life is sacred, from the tiniest amoeba to the shifting rock of mountains. Wright's argument thrives in a new moment in Christian theology, when the climate is in crisis and the moral imperative to act is now. Indeed, the etymology of “salvation,” the Latin salvus, translates to “health” and “wholeness”: the health and wholeness of life itself is not a future reality cut from the reality of the present.

Wright's book proceeds in three parts. Part I describes the scientific foundations of earth literacy in order to shape the Christian imagination from thinkers across Western history. “Earth literacy” refers to the responsibility to educate ourselves in nonhuman life-forms and processes. Wright cites Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme in understanding that “the evolution of the universe is ‘ordered by differentiation,’ ‘structured by autopoiesis’ (subjectivity), and ‘organized by communion’” (11, Wright's emphasis). The earth is a web of interconnected and interdependent systems; human beings, having perpetrated what Francis calls a “tyrannical anthropocentrism,” must now see with St. Francis that we are cosufferers with ecosystems in crisis, celebrating with St. Francis the diversity of the created world, such that “the ascent to God (divinization) is actually achieved by a deep descent into the world” (90).

Part 2 constructs an ecological theological anthropology based on four pillars. The first is the necessity of eschatological hope, from Irenaeus to Jürgen Moltmann, building on scientific consensus on quantum indeterminacy and uncertainty. Ecological theological anthropology depends on patience with the random events that are intrinsic to the animation of life in order to guard against fear of these events seeming arbitrary and meaningless, speaking to “God's self-limitation and labor to bring new life from death” (85). The second pillar underscores the worth of all created life in awareness that the “diminishment of Earth's biodiversity mirrors the loss of diversity in human communities” (97). The third pillar affirms the interconnectivity of matter and energy, matter and spirit: every molecule of our bodies originates from the residual remnants of exploding stars. The death of a star or the death of a human releases these molecules, transformed into something else. Hence, Wright's fourth pillar of an ecological theological anthropology: the union of kenosis (sacrificial emptying) and kinesis (energy) in a perichoretic paradox. This “kenotic-kinetic” power is how Wright describes the power of life in its movement between death and transformation, “the heart of cosmic creative effort,” (123) a marvelous image to guide Part 3, “Engaging the Mystery of Suffering.”

The problem of suffering, especially the unnecessary suffering of innocents, is perhaps the most difficult problem in theology to overcome. Wright approaches the problem in a new way, in the recognition that cycles of birth and death perpetuate life and propel life's evolution and divinization. With the image of kenotic-kinetic power, Wright shifts the anthropocentric (and predominantly Western) view that sentience and consciousness are located exclusively in humanity. Relying on the contributions of Lynn Margulis, Dorion Sagan, and Jay McDaniel, Wright expands the notion of sentience to all life-forms when regarded as the capacity of energy events to feel influences (185). The kenotic-kinetic is then “understood as a ‘give and take’ process that involves both creativity and cruciformity. It is a sacrificial dialectic of receptivity that demands that there be an openness to the other in oneself” (188). Suffering is thus extended to the sacrifices made by the earliest stars and the vegetables we eat, as well as “the single mother struggling to provide for her children” (218). Wright thus widens the ethic of care and responsibility: our advocacy “witnesses to the power of the evolving God-in-relation” such that the “ecological conversion” called for by Francis becomes radically inclusive.