One of the most destructive features of modern life is to deprive people of the sense that they are essentially creative beings. The industrialization and commercialization of work have a lot to do with this, but so too does the elevation of the fine artist as a lonely (often tortured) genius, and the reduction of people to passive consumers. In this chapter, Wirzba gives an account of good work as an indispensable means through which people contribute to the making of a beautiful world and thriving communities. To be creative is to respond to the sanctity of fellow creatures with the skill and devotion that contribute to shared flourishing. But for people to be creative in this way, the personal, social, economic, and political contexts through which they live need to be properly cultivated. The highest form of creativity is to focus and train one’s love into practical skills that join with the sacred love that is already at work in the world.

The teaching of creation has been much misunderstood and under-developed because it has been taken to be primarily about how the world began a long, long time ago. Religious naturalists have often abandoned this teaching so as to give a more scientifically informed characterization of our cosmos and humanity’s place within it. Wirzba argues that this is a big mistake because the rejection of the idea that our world is a divinely created world makes it impossible to speak of life as a gift. This chapter develops what it means to say that each creature is gift cherished and sustained in its being by God. As such, it opens the idea of creation to encompass life’s meaning and purpose, and it creates a way for people to become involved in the nurture and healing of our world and our shared life. The logic of creation, upon further examination, is not about God’s power “over” the world but about God’s presence to the world in the forms of love that invite human participation in it.

Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and genetic engineering/bio-enhancement reflect a deep-seated discontent with humanity’s embodied condition. This discontent is a contemporary variation on the long-standing dualisms that elevate mind/soul/intelligence over bodies and materiality. The (increasingly well-funded) desire to redesign human bodies and the habitats of our world grow out of the same logic that is reflected in an impatience with imperfection, vulnerability, and frustration. The end-result of transhumanism leads to a strange outcome, namely the eclipse, surpassing, and obliteration of the form of humanity itself. As such, transhumanism reflects a refusal to be in bodies and places, and thus is a particularly striking example of humanity’s rejection of its creaturely condition.

A term like “environment” communicates that a place is something that “surrounds” people. As such, environments are “outside” and separate from what a human being is. In this chapter, Wirzba argues that this way of speaking distorts our humanity because it does not adequately appreciate how deeply entangled people are in their places, with creatures and creaturely processes constantly circulating within and through our bodies. He develops the idea of life and world as a “meshwork” reality as framed by the anthropologist Tim Ingold. Meshwork transforms how people think about places by shifting our attention from a spatial location to complex, interlacing paths of codevelopment. Places are as much events and processes as they are locations on a map. This insight revolutionizes what we think a human being is by showing it to be intimately entangled in life’s embodied movements. The idea of transporting people to other planets or a disembodied heaven is a dangerous fantasy because it assumes that a human being could live a disentangled life apart from the bio-social meshworks that are its indispensable condition.

It is a truism that we live in a secular and disenchanted world. This chapter explores what is at stake in our abandonment/eclipse/rejection of a characterization of this world and its life as sacred. Wirzba examines how modern writers came to experience their life as fragmented and disconnected from a sacred cosmos, and how this feeling for life results in varying forms of homelessness. The forced migration of peoples and the destruction of homeplaces in never-before-seen rates testifies to a need to reinvigorate the sense that places are homes for living and for the cherishing of life as a sacred gift. What our refugee world and our mass extinction time needs is a recovery of the goodness, beauty, and hospitable character of our given life.

In recent years, Earth system scientists have acknowledged humanity’s Earth- and life-altering powers by calling our epoch the Anthropocene. This chapter explores the logic at work in this designation and argues that its roots go further back than the origins of industrialism and war capitalism in modernity (the Capitalocene). The essential and enduring issue is whether people can learn to live charitably within a world of limits. The origins of agriculture and the formation of city-states indicate what can be called a “thin Anthropocene” at work in the earliest civilizations evident around the globe. Examining this history, and the logic at work within it, enables us to see how people have thought about Earth and humanity’s place within it.

To say that human beings are creatures is to say that they are finite, fallible, and defined by their need of others to nurture and support them. It is to understand that people must learn to receive and then share again the life that they have been given. This places people in positions of vulnerability that are often hard to bear. This chapter explores the contours of creatureliness, and examines the character of our interdependence while also describing the communal conditions that are necessary if the vulnerability of people is to be honored rather than violated. Put another way, to live into our creaturely condition it is important for people to exercise forms of power that are modelled on the love of God made incarnate in Jesus. Characterized this way, creatureliness is humanity’s way of participating in the divine love that creates and sustains all of life.