World Without End
Essays on Apocalypse and After
As a child, Martha Park found it easy to believe in both God and the goodness of the world. “The world was drenched, then, with a presence everyone around me called God,” she writes. “I walked with one hand aloft at my side for him to hold.”
Over time, Park drifted from this assurance of divine companionship, but her sense of belonging to this earth only deepened. When her father retired after decades as a Methodist minister, the last tether to her childhood faith disappeared with him: “My life had been utterly shaped around walking into church and seeing my father in the doorway, and now there was no church, anywhere in the world, where I could find him on Sunday morning.”
World Without End twines Park’s love for this world with her uncertainty about a world to come. Through personal essays, nuanced reporting, and original illustrations, Park grapples with religious ambivalence and ecological care as she wonders how faith both compels and hinders our love for a planet in peril. The essays explore apocalypses personal and global, present and anticipated. Her writing moves nimbly between climate and religious apocalypses (such as biodiversity collapse and the rapture) before turning inward to investigate her own apocalypses: the loss of her faith, the birth of her son. She contrasts a love for this earth, home to wetlands and infants and roseate spoonbills, with the apocalyptic impulse that sends people into bunkers to prepare for its end.
