A Perturbed System - Religion and Climate Change from the End of a World

A moving study of how religion shapes Western climate discourse.

Our ecological system is disturbed, and with it, every other system we've built to inhabit it. We do not face inevitable destruction, yet many of us cannot conceive of climate change as anything but the end of the world, an apocalypse with all its biblical trappings. Why?

In A Perturbed System, anthropologist Susannah Crockford argues that we must understand the climate emergency as a spiritual crisis, a result of Christian colonialism that we (religious or not) still struggle to describe without religious language. Climate discourse in the United States and northern Europe, Crockford shows, is framed by the same theological motifs that drove extraction, including ideas about prophecy, mediation, sacrifice, original sin, cult, messiah, and apocalypse. By listening to people on the edge of the crisis, A Perturbed System reveals a world in transition, what happens when worlds end--ecologically, socially, politically, and personally--and how we might live through these endings together.

About the author

Susannah Crockford is a lecturer at the University of Exeter. She is the author of Ripples of the Universe: Spirituality in Sedona, Arizona, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Product details

• Authors: Susannah Crockford, Susannah Crockford
• Publisher: University Presses
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Release: 05.06.2026
• EAN: 9780226849805
• ISBN: 978-0-226-84980-5
• No. of pages: 368
• Weight: 454 g
• Illustrations: 19 halftones
• Series: Class 200: New Studies in Religion
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Religion/theology > Christianity; RELIGION / Christianity / Protestant, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology of Religion, RELIGION / Christian Theology / General, Theology, Christianity, Christian theology, Religious groups: social & cultural aspects, Social groups: religious groups and communities, Protestantism & Protestant Churches, Protestantism and Protestant Churches