Biography
Gabriel M. Colombo is an M.Div. student at Yale Divinity School and the Institute of Sacred Music working at the intersection of theology, liturgy, urbanism, and ecology. His scholarship, ministry, and design practice propose "eucharistic urbanism" as a mode of thinking, making, and inhabiting cities that attends to the sacredness of urban spaces and land and refers them back to God. Originally from Austin, Texas—the ancestral homeland of the Coahuiltecan, Tonkawa, Comanche, and Lipan Apache peoples—he received a B.A. in Plan II Honors (humanities) and urban studies from the University of Texas at Austin and a Master of Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School Design. Having practiced as an urban planner and designer in Boston for several years, he is now a postulant for holy orders to the priesthood in the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts.
Paper Abstract
Confronting the profound ecological crises of our time requires dismantling the entrenched epistemological dualism between human culture and “nature,” between city and wilderness. In Timothy Morton’s theory of “dark ecology,” such work involves rejecting saccharine solutionism and instead moving through “dark-depressing” toward “dark-uncanny” to reach “dark-sweet”: that is, embracing grief and our haunted entanglement with nonhuman beings to unlock melancholy joy. Drawing on Morton’s ecophilosophy, Virginia Burrus’ explication of ecopoetics in ancient Christian hagiography and architecture, and Catherine Keller’s ecofeminist process theology, this paper situates the monastery as a liminal space between city and wilderness, arguing that it is an ideal typology for, in Morton’s words, “think[ing]” and living “the ecological thought” in its spiritual complexity. First, this essay explores the contemplative and liturgical modalities of Morton’s book Dark Ecology—including its themes of darkness, “subscendence,” play, and paradox—revealing the theory’s fundamental resonance with monastic theology and spirituality. It secondly highlights the deep, often uncanny entanglement of ancient Egyptian desert monasticism—the primary source of the Christian monastic tradition—with place and the more-than-human world, arguing that the movement’s communities embodied a blurring of city and wilderness. It finally identifies two examples of contemporary landscape architecture—the High Line in New York and Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord in Duisburg, Germany—that exemplify the entwined principles of dark ecology and monasticism. Through them, it imagines a morphology of porous monastic urbanism in which city and wilderness, the human and more-than-human, might be practically and spiritually reunited.