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Decomposing Holy Ground

Theological Compost for Shifting Worlds

Decomposing Holy Ground

Theological Compost for Shifting Worlds

This item is in stock and will be dispatched within 48 hours.

More than 50 units in stock.

Paperback / softback

£25.00

Publisher: SCM Press
ISBN: 9780334061700
Number of Pages: 192
Published: 31/10/2025
Width: 13.5 cm
Height: 21.6 cm

For the church, “creation care” is back on the agenda. But is creation care really the full picture or do we need to learn that we are a part of the very creation of which we claim to be stewards. Does our climate crisis demand a more radical theological response? Decomposing Holy Ground argues that as our scientific, cultural and historical awareness of the complexities within the ground beneath our feet increases, it should lead us to full scale reimagining of ourselves, not as individuals but as a part of the land we mourn.

In this startling and radical piece of theological work, drawing on her understanding of earth, soil and compost, Emma Lietz Bilecky challenges us to rethink our understanding of land, church, race and God.

This is a book for anyone tired of shallow optimism and cheap faith in the face of climate breakdown, and who wants to better understand the deeply interconnected web of theology, race, colonialism and the environment.

BLOGPOST: Theological compost: breaking down our relationship with the land by Emma Lietz Bilecky on the SCM Press blog here.

Contents Preface ix Introduction xiii 1 Triangulating 1 Winter solstice 1 Soil work 2 Disorientation (a history) 3 Learning to listen 5 Troubling landscapes 8 Decomposition 12 Prayer 16 2 Making terra nullius 19 Spring equinox 19 Making soil 20 Terraformation 21 Prayer plows 23 Terra nullius and the Doctrine of Discovery 26 Naming land, claiming land 28 Land as property 29 Land as resource 31 Land as verb 35 Prayer 38 3 Compost Cosmologies 43 Summer solstice 43 Everything is compost 43 Land work 48 Being compost 50 Death is not a metaphor 55 Disintegration, decomposition 57 4 The Geography of Sin 60 Midsummer 60 Bad faith 62 Humans in the carbon cycle 64 Climate hedonism 67 Structural violence, collective sin 69 The fire, inferno 73 After the fire 75 Climate apocalypse in the built environment 76 Prayer 78 5 Becoming Place, Fermenting Culture 80 Fall equinox 80 Practice makes process 81 Preserving culture 83 Space and time 89 The weight of the world 91 Prayer 95 6 God is Change: Beyond Creation Care 99 Persephone 99 Feedback loops 100 Climate anxiety 103 Towards experience 106 From creation care, towards caring, creating 109 God is a gardener 112 Prayer 113

Emma Lietz Bilecky

Emma Lietz Bilecky researches the connection between theology, land use and farming. She lives in Colorado where she farms, teaches, and works to connect people and land.

You can tell when you have met someone who has truly and deeply seen something, experienced it in their breath and bones. Such a person speaks or writes with an authentic intensity. That is what you will feel on every page of this. Emma has experienced a transformation in her relationship to land, to soil, to Earth, to the web of carbon and water and sunlight and life of which we all are part. This is a transformation we need, for our common well-being depends on. This book makes that transformation contagious. Powerfully written and deeply insightful, this book is extraordinary.

-- Brian D. McLaren

Soil is not a metaphor, Emma Lietz Bilecky insists. In Decomposing Holy Ground, Bilecky invites us to get our hands dirty in the particularities of our local soil, to think through and with the soil about many of the most urgent issues of our world today, from climate crisis to colonialism, and to turn that thinking into truly earthed prayer. Digging deep with both scientific understanding and poetic contemplation, Decomposing Holy Ground calls us to practise new-and-ancient kinds of care for the earth, in the hope that together we might learn to survive.

-- Al Barrett