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Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love
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Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love

By: Elizabeth A. Johnson
Narrated by: Katherine Fenton
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About this listen

Bloomsbury presents Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love by Elizabeth A. Johnson, read by Katherine Fenton

For millennia plant and animal species have received little sustained attention as subjects of Christian theology and ethics in their own right.

Focused on the human dilemma of sin and redemptive grace, theology has considered the doctrine of creation to be mainly an overture to the main drama of human being`s relationship to God. What value does the natural world have within the framework of religious belief?

The crisis of biodiversity in our day, when species are going extinct at more than 1,000 times the natural rate, renders this question acutely important. Standard perspectives need to be realigned; theology needs to look out of the window, so to speak as well as in the mirror.

Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love leads to the conclusion that love of the natural world is an intrinsic element of faith in God and that far from being an add-on, ecological care is at the centre of moral life.

©2026 Elizabeth A. Johnson (P)2026 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Biological Sciences Christianity Environment Evolution Evolution & Genetics Religious Studies Science

Critic Reviews

In constructing her “dialogue between Charles Darwin’s account of the origin of species and the Christian story of the ineffable God of mercy and love recounted in the Nicene Creed” (xv), Johnson writes so skillfully in her judicious use of a broad swathe of traditional and contemporary literature, and also so beautifully, that this book may well stand out as one of the most important to come from the early twenty-first century. (Robert J. Daly, Boston College)
Like Darwin marveling at the web of life observed in the tangle of vegetation, insects, birds, and animals along a riverbank and at discovering the ‘grandeur’ of a view of life that is dynamic rather than static, Johnson’s stance is most often one of profound wonder at the complexity, beauty and mystery of creation and of its Creator. (Scott MacDougall, Fordham University)
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