World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After

For fans of Margaret Renkl and Lisa Wells's Believers, World Without End circles the connections between climate change and faith in the fear and fascination of the end of the world.

When Martha Park's father announces he is retiring from the ministry after forty-two years, she moves home to Memphis to attend his United Methodist church for his last year in the pulpit. She hopes to encounter a more certain sense of herself as secular or religious. Instead, she becomes increasingly compelled by her uncertainty, and grows curious whether doubt itself could be a kind of faith that more closely echoes a world 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 in which she was raised now seems like an exception to the rule, exploring this divide with compassion and empathy. For fans of Margaret Renkl and Lisa Wells, World Without End considers the ways religion shapes how we understand and interact with the world--and how faith can compel us all to work to save the places we love.

Martha Park is a writer and illustrator from Memphis, Tennessee. She received an MFA from the Jackson Center for Creative Writing at Hollins University, and was the Spring 2016 Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University's Stadler Center for Poetry. She has received fellowships and grants from the Religion & Environment Story Project, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Her collaborative illustrated journalism has been recognized with an EPPY Award for Best use of Data/Infographics and was a finalist for the Institute for Nonprofit News' Insight Award for Visual Journalism.

Martha's work has appeared in Orion, Oxford American, The Guardian, Grist, Guernica, The Bitter Southerner, ProPublica, and elsewhere.