A Story within a Story within other Stories: On Selecting Biblical Texts amid the Shift to the “Anthropocene”
Abstract
This contribution is provoked by Maina Talia’s impressive Ph.D. dissertation entitled “Am I not your Tuakoi? A Tuvaluan Plea for Survival in Time of Climate Emergency.” He proposes a reading of the parable of the merciful Samaritan instead of focusing on the Noah story or Job’s lament. How, then, does one select which story to read and how to read that? The Bible is clearly a story of many stories, while cultural contexts are of course also shaped by multiple, often conflicting stories. In this contribution, three intersecting sets of stories are explored, namely the biblical story in a canonical context, cosmological narratives (the universe story with specific reference to the advent of the Anthropocene), and the Christian story of God’s economy from creation to consummation. How, then, do these stories intersect with each other? How can this help us to come to terms with the contemporary shift from the Holocene to the Anthropocene?Downloads
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