Noah’s Arkive: A Roundtable Book Panel Discussion

To reflect on climate catastrophe, writers and artists often turn to biblical tellings of Noah’s ark. In Noah’s Arkive (University of Minnesota Press, 2023), Jeffrey J. Cohen and Julian Yates brilliantly examine lives and afterlives of the ark story with ecological attention. “The brute sketchiness of the biblical injunction ‘make yourself an ark’,” they write, “demands that its readers think hard about the difficulties of preserving a community against deluge, about who gets included and who excluded, about how the threat of the flood is experienced differently by varied groups of people and animals.” This session assembles a transdisciplinary ark of its own to respond and think-with Cohen and Yates. With biblical scholars, queer and feminist theologians, scholars of religion, ecology and society, this session hopes to explore the possibilities this book may provoke for religious studies, ecotheology, and the environmental humanities. The authors will offer a response.