World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After

For fans of Margaret Renkl and Lisa Wells’s Believers, World Without End circles the connections between climate change and faith in the fear and fascination of the end of the world.

When Martha Park’s father announced he was retiring from the ministry after forty-two years, she moved home to Memphis to attend his United Methodist church for his last year in the pulpit. She hoped to encounter a more certain sense of herself as secular or religious. Instead, she became increasingly compelled by uncertainty itself, curious about whether doubt could be a kind of faith, one that more closely echoed the world itself, one marked by loss, beauty, and constant change.

In illustrated essays, World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After explores the intersections of faith, motherhood, and the climate crisis across the South, from man-made wetlands in Arkansas to conservation cemeteries in South Carolina; from a full-scale replica of Noah’s Ark in Kentucky to the reenactment of the Scopes Monkey Trial. Park chronicles the ways the faith she was raised in now seems like an exception to the rule, and explores this divide with compassion and empathy.

World Without End considers the way religion shapes how Southerners understand and interact with the world—and how faith can compel them to work to save the places they love.

Praise for World Without End

“In these penetrating and beautifully wrought essays, Martha Park employs her many identities—artist, naturalist, southerner, mother, preacher’s daughter astray—to investigate profound questions about faith and the fate of our planet. It is rare to find a voice like this: at once vulnerable and rigorous, skeptical and compassionate, commanding and humble in the presence of mystery. It is rarer still when that voice—its questions and ideas—are so vividly embodied, so intimately involved with the sensory world. I have been raving about this book since I finished reading its exquisite and devastating final lines. As the title suggests, I suspect World Without End will endure long past the season of its birth, moving and engaging readers for years to come.” —Lisa Wells, author of Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World

“It’s hard to imagine a more trustworthy guide through the terrain of faith and doubt in this era of ecological catastrophe than Martha Park. In her hands, the stories we tell ourselves about the world—and how it may or may not end—are forces of nature in and of themselves, animated by electricity, gravity, and wonder. Like the theologian Martin Buber, Park sees the 'paradoxical unity of what one might typically see as opposites': not only on the grand scale of embodiment and limitlessness, time and eternity; but also in the messy details that emerge when family or community members are polarized by political or religious beliefs. Park’s illustrations, like her writing, are clear-eyed, carefully observed, fully of this world, yet mysteriously transcendent. This is a book to treasure.” —Arwen Donahue, author of Landings: A Crooked Creek Farm Year

“In elegant and exacting prose, Martha Park draws readers into the white southern Christianity of preppers and young earth creationists—but also of her progressive, renegade pastor-father. Compassionate but unflinching, Park shows us what faith can do when practiced with empathy instead of fear. An important new voice, and World Without End is a much needed reckoning.”—Cameron Dezen Hammon, author of This Is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession

“Rarely have I tucked in so hungrily to an essay collection, felt so welcomed. These pieces, beautifully connected to one another yet wide-reaching in terms of idea and question and observation, are held gently in their places by Martha Park’s tender illustrations and vulnerability. Weeks on, I still haven’t stopped thinking about it.” —Ella Frances Sanders, author of Everything, Beautiful: A Guide to Finding Hidden Beauty in the World