Speculative Fiction for a Nuclear-Ecological Life: Remembering Cold War Era Ecotheology

This paper offers a brief intellectual history of a Cold War era classic of ecotheology: Sallie McFague’s 1987 Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age. I argue that it provides an imaginative portal to a moment of recent history that may have some lessons for us, as we live differently into similar forms of possible danger: world obliterating violence, and environmental crisis. I focus on McFague’s suggestion that these dangers threaten to end the idea of the future, and her argument that theology is a form of fiction that creates imaginative pictures. Cold War era ecotheology can be read as a form of speculative fiction offering speculative visions of a thriving future earth life. One lesson scholars of religion and ecology might learn from  this Cold War era ecotheology is the importance of imagining (and re-imagining) our relationship to power, and to the future (which does not yet exist but can be imagined).