You Tube Theology

The monetisation of human, and human- Earth, relations has reached a new zenith in the last thirty years of exponential growth in digital money creation. This has occurred in tandem with the dawn of the epoch of the Anthropocene in which humans have become a dominant geological force. The monetisation of life fosters a new instrumentalising discourse in which humans, other animals, and whole ecosystems, become biopolitical 'resources'. In the Papal Encyclical Laudato Si': On Care for Our Common Home (2015), Pope Francis contrasts the 'magical' monetisation of human, and human-Earth, relations with the divine ecology of love which upholds cosmic and creaturely being. In eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe, romantic poets and philosophers sought to resist the monetisation of life with the idea of the natural 'sublime', and to protect sublime landscapes, and cultural artefacts, from industrial economic development. The key question to be addressed in this lecture is how, and whether, a neo-romantic ecology of love' may resist and revise the growing inequality between peoples, and growing asymmetry between humans and the Earth, which are the dark side of exponential money creation.