Todd LeVasseur is afraid. Only a few pages into the preface of Climate Change, Religion, and Our Bodily Future he writes: “The more I sit with unfolding scenarios and each updated study about real-time and predicated impacts of climate change, the more scared I become” (xvi). LeVasseur may well be scared, but this book is a masterwork of sober and exacting theory dynamized by a vigorous and searing critique of religious studies, the academy, and higher education. “It’s an indictment of the whole system,” founded upon an exploitative culture, which promotes research “that almost no one will ever read,” and “rewards such efforts as the world literally burns” (151). The critique is substantial and compelling: it is outlined in the introduction, returned to in the afterword, and ever-present throughout the text. As important as LeVasseur’s theoretical offerings and their case study modeling are to the study of religion and climate change, the critique (an indictment) of the academy that frames them, is of equal if not greater merit.LeVasseur’s book is intended for scholars, especially those wrestling with the impact of accelerating ecological collapse on religion. The book is of singular notice for those struggling to develop theoretic tools equal to the task of understanding what is happening, and will happen, to religions as the global ecosystem that nurtured human culture for 10,000 years disintegrates. Its foremost contribution to the development of these tools is a proposal to reform and reformulate the platforms and methods of religious studies and the academy as a whole to more successfully explore the complex web of interlocking crises of culture, climate, and consciousness. At the heart of the proposal is a call to recognize the grounding reality of physical existence; privilege the agency of the natural world; and reject approaches based on received traditions informed by dualisms, ontological hierarchies, and (the oft-used) “White CisHetero Settler Colonialist” worldviews.Climate Change, Religion, and Our Bodily Future is part of Lexington Books’ Studies in Body and Religion, “that addresses body as a fundamental category of analysis in the study of religion” (frontmatter). LeVasseur’s contribution to this series has two goals, together focused on “theorizing how changes brought by human-induced climate change/global warming…in the coming decades will alter the landscape of religion” (xiv). The goals are first, to propose a theoretic approach appropriate for religious studies to engage this changing landscape, and second, to offer case study examples of the application of the proposed theoretic approach. Part I presents the theory, part II its case study deployment.Part I (chapters 1–3) develops LeVasseur’s theory through a wide-ranging review of literature from various fields. He situates scholarship and scholars in a biological-materialist context, in a moment of “rapid shifts in baseline biogeochemical cycles” that demand “biocultural reorganization” and require “a new praxis of liberatory scholarship” (11). The depth and breadth of the review is impressive.From the many sources engaged and applied in Part I, several stand out for their relevance to LeVasseur’s theorizing and more generally to the study of religion in the context of ecological catastrophe. Chapter 2 offers appreciative appropriation of and advocacy for theories of Donna Haraway and Tim Ingold. Haraway’s “normative project…she calls a composist understanding of bodies,” is based on humility, a decentered recognition of the interconnectedness of all creation, and the fragility of our bodies (30). Ingold’s “dwelling perspective” reminds us that we exist “in sympoetic material relations of mutual becoming with the natural, ecological world” in which we are inescapably embedded (37). These understandings exemplify LeVasseur’s approach. In chapter 3, his nuanced treatment of Queer Theory and its addition to his theoretic assemblage is equally instructive, following up and expanding on other approaches that reject the fallacy of human exceptionalism, especially in religious contexts (46).Part II (chapters 4–7) presents case studies based on LeVasseur’s “type of theorizing about religious bodies during an era of rapid climate change” (xxv). As with other texts using the theory/case study structure, these chapters serve to model LeVasseur’s theories, and function as standalone studies. Unlike other texts of this sort, these studies are a bit more dependent on the earlier chapters, although LeVasseur’s presentation nicely applies the theoretic platforms and analytic concepts organically in the exposition of the cases.“Liquid Black Death” (chapter 4) studies “petroculture” in the context of “how insidiously wrapped up with oil our lifeways truly are” (65) and the dramaturgical power of the Standing Rock protest in the last decade. Chapters 5 and 6 analyze the impact of climate change on religious practices, especially pilgrimages, in the historical religions of Hinduism, Islam, and Buddhism. Chapter 7 is of distinct relevance to the study of new religions in its analysis of nontraditional sacral practices and embodiments, including surfing cultures and ecoerotic communities. A question LeVasseur poses about these communities (“bodies”) is similar to questions about other communities on the margins of mainstream culture: “What are these bodies doing, that may be religious, and why?” (114)The book closes with three short sections—a conclusion, an afterword, and a coda. Together they reaffirm with vigor and insight LeVasseur’s concerns, critiques, and proposals. In the afterword, LeVasseur returns “to the same frustration I voiced about religious studies, theology, and academia more broadly…do we need another study of some obtuse lacunae in religion, given our planetary home is rapidly tipping into a potential hell scape unfit for human habitation?” (150) We know his answer, of course. And after reading this book, which I highly recommend, it is hard to disagree.