Biography
Katie Mills is a first-year M.A.R. student in Religion and Ecology at Yale Divinity School. Previously, she studied Biomedical Humanities at Campbell University. Katie is interested in theologies of resurrection and hope in light of the climate crisis, along with the ability of liberation theologies to provide a vision of material change for her home in Appalachia and communities more broadly.
Paper Abstract
As the effects of climate change grow more tangible, right wing online influencers are beginning to subsume rhetoric acknowledging the crisis into their political project. Figures like The Liver King, Carnivore Aurelius, and Bronze Age Pervert encourage their audiences of young men to master their bodies and dominate their environments by bodybuilding, consuming raw beef liver and eggs, and buying up land for homesteading. In so doing, they claim that men will (re)create great societies and save humanity and the earth from their present “chaos.” This paper provides a Christian theological analysis of the body and environmental politics of the manosphere and posits that a theology of universal bodily resurrection could effectively push back on its harmful aesthetic and political impulses.