My book project rethinks this irresistible, yet elusive keyword of Christian ethical thought—solidarity—amid the immense challenges of racialized climate injustice. “Solidarity” animates Catholic social teaching, Protestant ethics, contemporary social movements, and pragmatist philosophy; few concepts bring popes, pastors, activists, and Richard Rorty into the same room like solidarity. Yet ubiquitous contemporary calls for solidarity of some group x (often ‘privileged’) with some other group y (often ‘marginalized’) tend to presume we know in advance what solidarity is, and the issue lies only with ‘applying’ it to various contexts. A deeper question lies beneath these presumptions, to which both theologians and church leaders must respond: What sort of animal is the human creature, such that solidarity across difference is possible for us to imagine in the first place, let alone enact?

The book addresses this core question by breaking it into three parts: the when, what, and how of solidarity. Part 1 (‘When’) asks: What is it about this present time—the so-called Anthropocene moment—which compels us to return to a fundamental inquiry into the sort of creatures we are? I reframe the climate crisis by grounding it in the ongoing histories of global racial violence—anti-Black slavery, anti-Indigenous colonialism, and global imperial resource extraction. Part 2 (‘What’) asks: What light can be shed upon the core question by a theological engagement—informed by Black and Indigenous studies—with current research in evolutionary anthropology on the complex forms of cooperative activity, interdependence, and commitment which we now unite under the conceptual heading ‘solidarity’? Part 3 (‘How’) asks: How do we become what we are? It is comprised of two sub-divisions, woven together: solidarity stories (narrative exemplars) and solidarity practices, what I call “spiritual exercises at the end of the world.”