Uselessness as Disruption: Spiritual Resources for Eco-Crisis

Economistic thinking honors quantifiable measures of growth above material consequences, thus functioning as a key source of modern human beings’ alienation from creation and from our own embodied creatureliness. Such measures often strike us as objective, which renders them immune to theological analysis or moral critique. In truth, they function as contestable objects of worship that inculcate spiritually malforming habits. A necessary response to economism and its destructive consequences for ecological flourishing and human happiness therefore includes counterliturgies of uselessness, which is to say, habits of life oriented toward measures of goodness that transcend economism.