Conclusion

The conclusion makes a case for the foregoing chapters’ theological work on human animality as a novel approach to ecological theology. The human relationship to the animality internal to human life shapes human relationships to nonhuman animals and the natural world in a determinative way. Where humanity is defined over against animality and performed in each human life through efforts to transcend one’s own animality—as the bulk of the Christian tradition would have it—then humanity is ill equipped to life in ecological relationships of mutuality and responsibility with fellow creatures. A theology whose account of human life is centered on human animality is one necessary piece of an adequate response to ecological degradation.