New possibilities for collective life” (Santner): Counter-apocalypse, the Peaceable Kingdom and an ethics of survival | Anne Elvey

Summary: Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Anne Elvey The book of Acts describes an early Christian community living an ideal in which property was held in common and ‘there was not a needy person among them’ (4:34). To this utopian picture, I bring three threads that resonate (sometimes disturbingly) both beneath Luke’s egalitarian account and in more recent ecological and postcolonial philosophies and theologies. The first is the underlying socio-cultural thread of slavery; the second is the question of human/other than human relations in a more than human framework; the third is the apocalyptic imagination. The paper explores these threads through the work of Catherine Keller on ecological postcolonial counter-apocalypses; selected contemporary uses of the peaceable kingdom motif; Val Plumwood’s work on the master-slave paradigm and on being prey; and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, to ask what an ethics of survival might look like in the context of seeking ‘new possibilities for collective life’. Anne Elvey is an experienced theologian and author who has taught at ACU and UFT. Her work in eco theology is supported by the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University. Anne is also a poet of some note who has had her work published in several journals.