Biography
Gavin Chase is currently a first-year MDiv student at Princeton Theological Seminary pursuing a concentration in Theology, Ecology, and Formation. His interests include literary criticism as well as the intersections of decolonial studies, Indigenous ecologies and post-supersessionist hermeneutics. Gavin works as associate editor for God Here and Now magazine and poultry assistant (aka “chicken tender”) for Princeton’s Farminary Project.
Paper Abstract
In a moment when religious communities seek to be restorative agents in the fractured bond between humans and non-humans, it is often uncertain how (re)generative work should be undertaken amid the ongoing reckoning with histories of disintegration, otherization, and religious complicity. Many look to permaculture: a Western agrarian model embedded in the harmonious integration of people and landscapes. Despite offering a restoried design of creaturely interconnectedness, the realities and repercussions of permaculture’s function as a Western model fragmentally continues a supersessionist imagination in which many do not account for the origin story/ies embedded in Indigenous communities, practices, and cosmologies. This elicits the task to unearth new theological language(s), aesthetics and poetics of relationality generated by persons often historically suppressed – the human and non-human “others.” The hope is to bring religious communities into ecological discourses seeking to re-Indigenize permaculture, and listen to the many others reclaiming the nutritional value of living economies enfolded in the processes of gift-giving and who motion toward a beautifully chaotic honoring of creaturely entanglements.