Cambridge University Press This Sacred Life: Humanity's Place in a Wounded World

In a time of climate change, environmental degradation, and social injustice, the question of the value and purpose of human life has become urgent. What are the grounds for hope in a wounded world? This Sacred Life gives a deep philosophical and religious articulation of humanity's identity and vocation by rooting people in a symbiotic, meshwork world that is saturated with sacred gifts. The benefits of artificial intelligence and genetic enhancement notwithstanding, Norman Wirzba shows how an account of humans as interdependent and vulnerable creatures orients people to be a creative, healing presence in a world punctuated by wounds. He argues that the commodification of places and creatures needs to be resisted so that all life can be cherished and celebrated. Humanity's fundamental vocation is to bear witness to God's love for creaturely life, and to commit to the construction of a hospitable and beautiful world. Review 'How can we live with hope in the midst of a deeply wounded world? In prose as lucid in style as it is illuminating in content, Norman Wirzba's This Sacred Life builds a patient, forceful and elegant case that knowing where we are is crucial to understanding both who we are as human beings and how we are to live in ways that nourish our own being together with that of the world that sustains us. Drawing on biology, ecology, anthropology, economics and psychology as well as theology to show how our lives are densely interwoven with the well-being of soil, air and water, he provides an arresting vision of the gift such a rooted and entangled life can be.' Ian A. McFarland, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Theology, Candler School of Theology, and Quondam Regius Professor of Divinity, University of Cambridge'After the first two chapters' diving deeply into the painful wounds of our world the reader is amply rewarded. Discernments for our soil bound life in a meshwork, where rootedness and entanglement are crucial, encourage thinking and acting otherwise. Countervailing power emerges in a polyphonic and widely read dialogue with Ingold, Levinas, Bonhoeffer and many others. Wirzba's vision of life as a sacred gift and our resonance in sympathetic co-becoming accumulates an overwhelming amount of hope and faith that deserves a widespread open-minded readership.' Sigurd Bergmann, Emeritus Professor in Religious Studies (Trondheim, Lund, Uppsala, Munich)'Scriptures have said so 'from the beginning' while theologians have asserted for centuries that creation is a sacred gift and invites a sacred vocation. Wirzba articulately, delicately, and exactingly fleshes out the implications of this premise for a deeper sensibility and sympathetic community, for transparent economies and a participatory democracy, as well as for self-conscious city-building with life-supporting infrastructures. His appeal to a world afflicted by discontent and affected by a pandemic is to reimagine creation and creatures as being and living together, to reflect on where we are and who we are in order, as T. S. Elliot says, to 'know the place for the first time'.' John Chryssavgis, author of Creation as Sacrament'Norman Wirzba has long been one of the most perceptive observers of our predicament, and this fine book encapsulates so much of his wisdom. You will come out of it feeling a greater sense of what the author calls 'creatureliness,' and that will be both a comfort, and a goad to do the work that must be done to preserve the possibilities of this wonderful planet.' Bill McKibben, author The End of Nature'There is no more important interpreter of how to envision thriving life with the living planet than Norman Wirzba. [He] writes in ways that bring the religious and the nonreligious, the Christian and non-Christian into a shared perception of the problems and possibilities of healthy creaturely life. This beautifully rendered account of the sacrality of life offers what so many writing today on ecology, ec