What do Margaret Atwood, Christian creation care, and the apocalypse have in common? If you鈥檙e familiar with Atwood鈥檚 past criticism of organized religion, you might be expecting a punchline. But in fact Dr. Deborah Bowen, professor of English, has spent the last year researching the connections between them as part of her 2015 Zylstra grant project: 鈥淓coAtwood meets EcoChristianity.鈥
鈥淪ome environmentalists see being hopeful as kind of a cop out, a way of escaping reality. I don鈥檛 have that option as a person of faith. We鈥檙e called to live in hope.鈥
Bowen employs Atwood鈥檚 dystopian, post-apocalyptic as a vehicle for exploring our culture鈥檚 anxiety over environmental apocalypse and how the Christian story might speak to these concerns. 鈥淭he Christian story ends with an apocalypse which heralds a renewed earth for redeemed people,鈥 Bowen notes. Hope is at the centre of Bowen鈥檚 research, something she knows is an anomaly. 鈥淪ome environmentalists see being hopeful as kind of a cop out, a way of escaping reality. I don鈥檛 have that option as a person of faith. We鈥檙e called to live in hope.鈥
The Zylstra grant provided Bowen with the time and resources needed to strengthen her research agenda.聽She has since gone on to win a prestigious 2016 Grant, awarded at$15,885.聽Research that began as an exploration of hopeful connections between the literary, the ecological, and the divine has evolved into a government-funded project investigating agency and hope in environmentally-focused poetry in southern Ontario.