Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart

By Brian D. McLaren. St. Martin’s Essentials, 2024. 304 pages. $28/hardcover; $14.99/eBook.

This book starts out with doom. As was known in the Roman Empire’s latter days, we are placed in the midst of decline: “a fast-growing, complex, expensive, unequal, resource-hungry, fragile, fractious, and weaponized civilization that is a threat to both the environment and to itself.” He briefly lays out four possible future scenarios for this unrepentant civilization that is overshooting and sinking under its own weight. All oriented around potential collapse, each scenario is successively harder to contemplate: from the best cases—avoidance (increasingly unlikely) or rebirth (requires learning from failure)—to the worst—survival (under extremely harsh conditions) or extinction (total self-destruction). Rather than dwelling there and considering more or less likely outcomes, however, he devotes the rest of the book to considering how to stay fully alive as we face inevitable losses and great unknowns.

A former college English teacher, McLaren spent over 20 years as a minister before becoming an author, activist, and public theologian. His primary audience appears to be good Christians who are beginning to have big questions that the Church seems unable to address. He suggests that we must stop identifying with the intertwined stories told by religious fundamentalism and economic fundamentalism. I loved his fresh framing of the Bible as an Indigenous origin story with a recurrent theme of liberation from oppressive systems, and his later image of Paul and his followers organizing little communities of creative resistance within the Roman Empire.

McLaren’s life journey has brought him into communion with others on their own “inward migration.” We may have started in different places but are all seeking alternatives to a story and set of values we cannot love. I find him a trustworthy traveling companion and was glad to follow his directions, clearly laid out in the book’s four parts: starting with “a path of descent” to “a place of insight,” and then on to the paths “of resilience” and “of agile engagement.”

So, how do we live? Fossil fuels have filled us with delusions of omnipotence, so we transform to running on clean energy inside ourselves. Our culture actively peddles addictions everywhere, but the ultimate one may be our own desire for control. Drawing on Alcoholics Anonymous, McLaren suggests that we must first admit that we are addicted.

We challenge our culture’s need to know—whether “knowing” that solutions can be found by mining our civilization’s narrative more deeply, or “knowing” that only the gullible continue to hope. Both optimism and despair offer a map we can read. This is a time to change our orientation toward not knowing. McLaren cites the wisdom of Wendell Berry: “The mind that is not baffled is not employed.”

Abandoning attachment to outcomes, we shift to living as human beings should live: defying the future in choosing an abundant and meaningful life. We acknowledge the importance of grieving as a necessary step in releasing our precious and enduring love, and we love all that we can still save. Love may or may not bring a solution to our predicament, he suggests, but it will provide a way forward in that predicament. It will never be too late to love.

We learn from those who have gone before. This is not a time to claim exceptionalism. There have been other civilizations, and the ancestors of Native American and Black people survived the end of their worlds. We detach from our delusions of separateness from history, from other peoples, from all of life, and, in the face of collapse, we come together with wisdom and courage.

McLaren gives sustenance for our spirits in language that is easy to love. Here is a sampling: We tend to our light and keep it shining. We gather in circles of beauty everywhere, loving fiercely and creating little islands of composure and sanity. We put down our roots in the privilege of being alive in a time that matters so much. We seek what is ours to do and do it with all our hearts. We imagine safe landings and new beginnings, cultivating plans that are dynamic and experimental. We commit to never giving up, to keep on shining and dancing, whatever the future may bring. We follow Rumi: “What do we do? / We love life. / This is our full-time job.”

McLaren cares deeply about his readers, checking in with us explicitly as we go along. He cares deeply about life on Earth, and he cares deeply about cultivating resilience. I took thousands of words of notes; this review just can’t do justice to the depth and wisdom of this book. Do yourself a favor: read it yourself, and then share it with loved ones. Friends need Brian McLaren’s wisdom in these times.

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Pamela Haines is a member of Central Philadelphia (Pa.) Meeting. Author of Money and Soul, her newest titles are Tending Sacred Ground: Respectful Parenting; The Promise of Right Relationship; and a third volume of poetry, Tending the Web: Poems of Connection. Her blog and podcast can be found at pamelahaines.substack.com.