This essay was originally published in Space on Space Magazine, on April 8, 2024.
I know possession to be a curse. The notion that one can possess the earth, or stake a private claim upon it as one’s property haunts our world. The maddening greed that possesses private developers to hoard what was originally given as a gift is the root of many of today’s problems. As a theologian, I find myself ruminating on how the modern notion of land ownership continues to be a matter of intense contestation. One need not look any further than the current genocide of Palestinians under Israeli military occupation. A recent death toll has numbered more than 30,000 slain, including over 10,000 children. These are horrific numbers that parallel other nations currently experiencing warfare and genocide in Yemen, Congo, Sudan, Ukraine, and other places. In many such cases of bloodshed, the question of land comes to the fore. Land becomes a tapestry of conflict. It becomes the site of violence, bloodshed, detonated warheads, and bullet shells.
Such violence signals the importance of reconfiguring how one thinks and practices. The term “theology of land,” wherein land is understood not as a thing to be possessed, but as that which is fundamental to any sort of creaturely gathering, becomes important. Land is the matter of all mattering, for without land, there can be no thing. All life, any kind of creaturely living or breathing, ceases when land is taken out of the picture. Much of modernity has taken this for granted—land is simply a given for our modern sensibilities. The challenge is now to reconfigure such sensibilities away from the distortions that withhold them. Current socialities make land invisible since land can only be conceived in modernity as property. The question now becomes: How does one practice outside of modern frames that take land for granted?