The Paradoxes of Place: Cultivating Particularity and Planetarity Amid Climate Catastrophe

Abstract

Places are simultaneously particular yet porous. How exactly does one conceive of the boundaries of bioregions, the edges of ecosystems? Thus, the first paradox of place: places are located yet linked, contextual yet enmeshed. Further, land is not a concrete foundation, nor even exactly terra firma—at least not when considering contemporary soil science, process metaphysics, and systems ecology. That which grounds our existence reveals itself to be a complex web of becomings, transitions, movements. Thus, the second paradox of place: places are simultaneously grounding and ungrounding. This paper will explore the theological potencies of these paradoxes, asking the following sets of queries: 1. Might the traditions of apophatic theology help us attend to the paradoxical particularity and permeability of place? In other words, how might mystical negative theologies disclose the aporias that prefigure place? 2. Could the paradoxes of place illuminate novel modes of pluralistic, interreligious planetary politics in the Anthropocene? Might the revelations of place offer a vision for possibilities of cooperation across lines of critical differences—in which differences serve not as divisions but relations?