For a poetics of the land: Theological imagination and the Book of Ruth’s ecological common good

The story of Ruth’s redemption in the bounty of the land is a radical reimagining of the Genesis narrative of the fall, it reverses first humanity’s expulsion from the land, and it subverts the judgement separating humanity from the land. In doing this, Ruth’s narrative of the stranger, staking her life on Israel’s soil and Israel’s God, puts individual autonomy, transcendence, and ecology into focus. This helps us to rewrite the terms on which humanity can begin to make peace with the natural world. Theologically, Genesis 3.19—“you shall return to the ground from which you were taken”—becomes a story of promise, and not a curse. Ecologically, “for dust you are, and to dust you shall return,” invites human agency in the healing of the land. These are critical starting points for contemporary reflection on religion, the environment, the literary imagination, and the common good. We need the power of story to underpin humanity’s “unfinished dialogue” with nature (Max Nicholson, 1970), and to give us “courage both to shape our world creatively, and reverently” (Judith Wolfe, 2024). In this chapter, the renewal of the imagination is that story, and this in itself is a prophetic and public good.