When Martha Park’s father announced he was retiring from the ministry after forty-two years, she moved home to Memphis to attend his United Methodist church for his last year in the pulpit. She hoped to encounter a more certain sense of herself as secular or religious. Instead, she became increasingly compelled by uncertainty itself, curious about whether doubt could be a kind of faith, one that more closely echoed the world itself, one marked by loss, beauty, and constant change.

In illustrated essays, World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After, explores the intersections of faith, motherhood, and the climate crisis across the South, from man-made wetlands in Arkansas to conservation cemeteries in South Carolina; from a full-scale replica of Noah’s Ark in Kentucky to the reenactment of the Scopes Monkey Trial. Park chronicles the ways the faith she was raised in now seems like an exception to the rule, and explores this divide with compassion and empathy.

World Without End considers the way religion shapes how Southerners understand and interact with the world—and how faith can compel them to work to save the places they love.

Reviews:

“Park deftly weaves journalism, philosophical and theological writings, and personal experience into a keenly observed discussion of the modern experience of the American South that never veers into stereotype or finger-pointing.” —Rebecca Brody, Library Journal

“[Park’s] stories are immersive, making readers feel as though they are reading a personal diary. Though writing about the apocalypse can hardly be called cheerful, Park’s message—of community, hope, and finding faith through questioning what it all means—makes for a missive of light that shines brightly amid otherwise consuming darkness.”  —Carrie Rasak, Booklist

“A gorgeous exercise in open theology, Martha Park’s essay collection World Without End ponders climate change, social inequities, family, and religion. Her collection places generosity, curiosity, and the desire to make the world better at its fore. The collection is illuminating throughout [and] excavates ultimate meaning from care shown toward the earth and other people.”  —Michelle Anne Shingler, Foreword Reviews, Starred Review

“World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After is a deeply felt and carefully investigated collection about faith and science. Empathetic and precise.” –  “God Is Change: Martha Park embraces uncertainty in World Without End” – Lou Turner, Chapter 16

“Across each of these vulnerable essays, Park offers no definitive path forward. What each essay points to is unending change. This book is needed. Instead of sharing hard-and-fast edicts, the kind desired by those with a fundamentalist frame of mind, Park advocates for courage and conversation. When we, too, ask questions about life, death, parenting, the climate, God, and how to be a good human, she is generous enough to tell us a hard truth: there are no answers. But knowing, and even understanding, isn’t the goal. The task, according to Park, is not to shrink away from this difficult time, but to engage with it, to do something to make it better, and to continue…without end.” —Toby LeBlanc, Southern Review of Books

“[I]n these echo-chambered times, World Without End is a much-needed palliative.” – Rien Fertel, The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate

“A dazzling new memoir. Martha Park’s unforgettable World Without End is a master class on how sharing the most particular and personal details can have the ironic effect of revealing universal truths. She does so through beautiful essays and illustrations. By narrowing in on her childhood memories and questions about motherhood, and then zooming out to gorgeous observations of the South’s mountains and coasts, she asks, as perhaps we all do, how to find a foothold in the wilds of life.” —CJ Lotz Diego, Garden & Gun

“In elegant and exacting prose, Martha Park draws readers into the white southern Christianity of preppers and young earth creationists—but also of her progressive, renegade pastor-father. Compassionate but unflinching, Park shows us what faith can do when practiced with empathy instead of fear. An important new voice, and World Without End is a much needed reckoning.” —Cameron Dezen Hammon, author of This Is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession

“These essays are elegiac, but they are also working—with dexterity, with nuance, with tenderness—to imagine the continuation of this world. World Without End traces Park’s journey toward a faith marked not by certainty but by grappling and beckons toward a future in which creatures of all kinds can thrive.” — Annelise Jolley, Christian Century

“Park’s particular genius lies in the deft way she weaves threads from her own life with today’s thorniest questions. She considers: How can groups of people interpret our shared world so differently? Does belief in an afterlife lead some to abandon care for this world? Is it better to prepare for disaster in isolation or community? Are there ways in which even our disparate beliefs can come together?” – Soul Searching Through the South: Essay writer and illustrator Martha Park considers faith, family, climate change, and community in her debut collection – Christina Nifong