About the Book
Hell on earth is real. The toxic fusion of big oil, Evangelical Christianity, and white supremacy has ignited a worldwide inferno, more phantasmagoric than anything William Blake could dream up and more cataclysmic than we can fathom. Escaping global warming hell, this revelatory book shows, requires a radical, mystical marriage of Christianity and biology that awakens a future beyond white male savagery.
Timothy Morton argues that there is an unexpected yet profound relationship between religion and ecology that can guide a planet-scale response to the climate crisis. Spiritual and mystical feelings have a deep resonance with ecological thinking, and together they provide the resources environmentalism desperately needs in this time of climate emergency. Morton finds solutions in a radical revaluation of Christianity, furnishing ecological politics with a language of mercy and forgiveness that draws from Christian traditions without bringing along their baggage. They call for a global environmental movement that fuses ecology and mysticism and puts race and gender front and center. This nonviolent resistance can stage an all-out assault on the ultimate Satanic mill: the concept of master and slave, manifesting today in white supremacy, patriarchy, and environmental destruction. Passionate, erudite, and playful, Hell takes readers on a full-color journey into the contemporary underworld-and offers a surprising vision of salvation.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
What the Hell: An Exordium
Christ’s Earthly Form Divine: An Introduction
Part I: Holy
1. Welcome to Hell
2. Hell on Earth
3. Hell, Where All Your Dreams Come True
Part II: Holy
4. Nobodaddy’s Home
5. Parabolas of Hell
6. Abortions
Part III: Holy
7. Hot as Hell
8. Experiences
9. Worlds Without Ends
Notes
Read, Listen, and Watch Like Hell
Index
About the Author :
Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University and director of the Cool America Foundation. They are the author of more than twenty books, including Hyperobjects, Dark Ecology, and Ecology Without Nature. Morton has collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Björk, Jennifer Walshe, Susan Kucera, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, and Olafur Eliasson.
Review :
An erudite theological meditation….readers will find insights into the ways religion shapes conceptions of science and the self.
Hell cultivates an experience more than it lays out an argument, as if to chip away at the certainties that have long held Christians captive to the colonialist and capitalist structures that have brought hell into the present. This book is maddening, and therein lies its brilliance.
Morton invites us on a search for something sexy, life-giving, sacred, and psychedelic. This is a book that is all about feeling, and which draws us into a feeling of the sacredness of life.
Hell is utterly impossible to put down just because of the sheer force of its language — one cannot stop because one has to know what the next sentence, the next image, the next paragraph will bring. … violently brilliant, overpowering, magical, mystical, intimate, ineffable, and, yes, holy.
If you like depth to your revolutionary prose, you should read this book. It’s more daring, fundamental, and radical than any book about the environment written by an ecosocialist. It’s also incomparably more entertaining.
Timothy Morton has written a book that deserves to occupy people for a long time to come. It deserves the attention of anyone who cares for Blake or for ecology, and anyone who has longed to see a revived truly radical Christianity. Hell is a beautiful book.
Hell, if we are serious about changing the trajectory of the universe, this book is a must read. It is not the typical Christian ecology book, it’s not even the typical ecology book. It’s deep. It’s personal. – And it flips our thinking about what’s necessary to save both our planet and our own souls.
Consciously written 'with' Blake, Hell is daring on many levels. Its move closer to the 'feel' of a different ecological future is also a move closer to the feeling of Blake’s friendship, at a time when we need it most.
The prose is a living thing, and the editing is impeccable. To fully appreciate this exasperating, dazzling, and deeply personal book is to grasp Morton’s principle of phenomenology: ‘The how is the what’
What a massive relief to have another book about the biggest disasters of our age from the hilarious, wise, and brilliant Tim Morton. Wild and free, Tim’s ideas give me hope.
Timothy Morton journeys with the restless and radical spirit of William Blake through Hell, seeking synthesis and reconciliation between the methods of science and the spirit of religion. Signaling to us through the flames of their own personal hell, Morton shapes a space where we—freed from Cartesian subjectivity and the demands of old, vengeful gods—may glimpse the prospect of a new Jerusalem, one built on love.
Hell is an ecstatic sermon beamed in from another dimension, one far stranger and more human than our own. I often think that dimension is where Timothy Morton’s consciousness resides, and we are so very lucky for it.
Reading Timothy Morton is something between watching a gifted comedian and experiencing a religious conversion. This book is classic Tim Morton, and it's more. It's William Blake's "mental fight" reimagined for our contemporary world. It's religion reloaded after a major born-again experience (yep), British colonialism, ecological catastrophe, and the efflorescence of diversity on every racial, sexual, and gender level one can imagine (and then some). Hell is a trip, and a flip. Get ready. You probably already are.
