(Walcott 2010, p. 86)

There is an important lesson here the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene demands that humanity faces some ugly facts—not just about nature, but about our own history as a species. But if postcolonial poetics can teach us anything, it is the risk of neglecting the present out of nostalgia for what we have lost. We cannot afford to become addicted to degradation nor even to bemoaning it. For believers, this would mean that the Anthropocene requires human beings to face the Creation with sobered realism and with willed humility and awe. Meeting nature with praise as a divine creation and gift helps to see the condition of embodiment as a blessing rather than as a curse. It begins again the search for new metaphors that might be adequate to the experience of wonder that embodiment inspires. Consider the alternative. Incapable of praise, either because of terror, despair, or indifference, we as a species find ourselves on some kind of downward spiral of inevitable declension. Once Adam and Eve fall, they just keep falling. Once human beings ruin one landscape or one history, they just keep on ruining it again and again, like a dog returning to its vomit.

Too many in the Christian community in the United States continue to sell their theological birthright for a mess of dominionist pottage, falsely assuming that there was something wrong and in need of repair about this world from the moment humans stepped outside of the garden. Christians have been acting as Adam and Eve, over and over again, but in the context of the wrong theology—and the earth's degradations show for it. I say this because they have assumed the world needs redemption through escapist transcendence or through engineered novelty—like some kind of plastic surgery on what they falsely imagine to be the earth's inadequate body, which embarrasses because of its raw asymmetry, lack of proper color, or unruly wildness and incoherence.

Ruination and degradation are undeniably, sobering realities. Carbon emissions that won't leave the atmosphere for hundreds of years challenge the grounds for hope, but fatalism is the curse all Christians must avoid. Novelty based on creative transformation of the conditions of disrepair and despair is what is needed. This is not only indispensable for hope in the Anthropocene but, as I hope I have helped to show, it is, or can be, the very hope of Christian theology. Just as the world needs ecological restoration, I suspect that Christianity faiths need to be restored to their former wisdom, again and again, for adherents to finally awaken and arise to the reality of the world they have inherited. And with each attempt to come to themselves and recall what they have forgotten, perhaps the ruinated world stands a chance to become a new creature too.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.
