World Without End
Essays on Apocalypse and After
A gorgeous exercise in open theology, Martha Park’s essay collection World Without End ponders climate change, social inequities, family, and religion.
Though it has roots in her Christian upbringing, Park’s book treats faith less as a matter of certainty than it is a continual search. Her collection places generosity, curiosity, and the desire to make the world better at its fore. It quotes activist rabbis often; it laments the loss of endangered species; it indicts entrenched fundamentalism with a bevy of social ills.
The collection is illuminating throughout. Writing about Kentucky’s Ark Encounter—visited with her post-evangelical husband, who called the place “a scourge upon humanity”—Park muses over what it’s like to wander “through a rapid-fire re-writing of natural history” and end up beyond the vessel’s closed door, threatened with damnation. Visiting the site of the Scopes Trial with her parents, she muses over what it means to find science threatening and discusses biological synchronicity. She writes through COVID-19 and pregnancy, expressing gratitude for the proximity of her family and worry for those left alone.
Also moving are Park’s explorations of being the daughter of an antiwar preacher. She spent the last year of her father’s career soaking up his sermons and crying. Flowers pressed between the pages of his heavy Bible took on lasting meaning; plucked out and set aside mid-sermon later on, they are made to speak to divine and interpersonal love. While watching him toss his sermons into a fire post-retirement, she mourned how he “seemed to be erasing vast swaths of history and memory that didn’t belong only to him,” but found comfort in an outsider’s assurance that his pyre was an act of mourning.
World Without End is a powerful essay collection that excavates ultimate meaning from care shown toward the earth and other people.
Reviewed by
Michelle Anne Schingler
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
