Vital Cosmologies, Multiplying Abundance: William Connolly’s Stormy Weather

There is a lot I like about this book.In particular, I like how it ties together many themes Connolly has written about over his career, especially the last two decades.These themes include pluralism, creed, climate, Christianity and its legacy, capitalism, bumpy time, systems theory/thinking, assemblages, and agonism.Stormy Weather feels cumulative and not just an update; it extends the concept of agonism that has animated Connolly's writing into contexts such as creedal difference, but also his image of nature itself, which is less pastoral and more turbulent.I also like the eclecticism of the sources here: James Baldwin, Aztec myth, Spanish priests, Pope Francis, Augustine, Nietzsche, Sophocles, Amitav Ghosh, to name a few.Connolly assembles these voices to explain how lived cosmologies inform the (re)emergence of racism, xenophobic responses to migrants, and fascism, all of which he understands as linked to climate change.With the help of these interlocutors, Connolly is able to analyze overlapping temporalities among humans and non-human agents at work in shaping the present political moment.Readers of Connolly's work are aware of his long-standing interest in grasping the relationships among creedal beliefs, political imagination, and actions.In Stormy Weather, Connolly tracks the consequences of three purges-two historic and a third ongoing-against paganism and the pluralism it represents.Augustine's attack on competing sects as part of an effort to consolidate the authority of Christianity represents the first purge.According to Connolly, the rituals and disciplines associated with, on the one hand, Augustine's commitments to providential nature and time, and, on the other, his hostility towards pagans, Jews, and heretic Christians, sanction attacks on the wayward.Second, to accept God's ultimate dominion over the earth and cosmos as Augustine does, is in tension with the fact that human activities have caused climate change.The precedent of the Lisbon earthquake suggests that, for some believers, climate change reflects God's punishment.From this perspective, Connolly lauds Pope Francis for qualifying Augustine's teachings and making them compatible with protecting the planet's ecology, in part by identifying the unsustainability of current levels of consumption under capitalism.The second conquest refers to the process of settler colonialism and genocidal conquest in the New World.Here, Connolly juxtaposes the Augustinian universalism of Sepulveda, the Spanish priest who argued that the indigenous people of the New World were sub-human, with the Aztecs' cyclical image of time.Sepulveda inherits and extends Augustine's anti-paganism,