World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After

by Martha Park

In the vein of 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 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 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 ways religion shapes the way Southerners understand and interact with the world—and how faith can compel them to work to save the places they love.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Memoir, Nature

240 pages, Hardcover

Published May 6, 2025

Reviews

[Violeta · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most thought-provoking books I’ve read recently. Park writes about faith, climate change, and motherhood— sometimes through journalistic-style pieces, sometimes through personal essays— in a way that reflects the spiral of inquiry and experience and multiple-verb-tense uncertainty. There’s a kind of wrestling with belief going on here that invites participation, even while knowing that’s a heavy ask.

I loved and wanted more of the personal essays like “Crying in Church,” “Arkansas Prophecy,” and “Wound Care,” but I’ll keep thinking about all of these essays for a long time to come.

I also have to say that the physical book is beautiful! Park’s cover and interior drawings, and the book’s layout and design, really add up to make something special, so this one is worth getting in hard copy if you can!

[Amanda Crice · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is gorgeous. It’s my favorite kind of writing, as she weaves the daily reality of our lives and of creation with questions about God and faith. She doesn’t proclaim any concrete answers, but invites an open and expansive heart - which, to me, feels better than any answer we could try to cling to around matters of faith.

[Stan Lake · Rating 5 out of 5]

“World Without End: Essays On Apocalypse And After”is a great collection of essays by Martha Park. The essays wrestle with cultural evangelicalism, deconstruction and reconstruction of a personal faith, and the woes of an environment being depleted by the ravages of a changing world. The essays are introspective, deeply personal, and well researched. The author searches for meaning in a world rife with the nuances imbued by varying interpretations of the Bible and the climate crisis. I really enjoyed hearing her come to terms with a childhood spent watching her father, a Methodist minister, retire from the pulpit and the impact that had on her beliefs. The stories about extinction especially kept me reading. This book will challenge and encourage you. It was a great read.

[Haley Williamson · Rating 5 out of 5]

How different would my life be if I’d been raised UMC? Ha. Really thought provoking essays!

[Michael Doane · Rating 5 out of 5]

World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After is a quietly powerful and deeply humane meditation on faith, doubt, and environmental loss in an age defined by uncertainty. Martha Park brings intellectual rigor and emotional honesty to questions many readers are afraid to ask: what does belief look like when the world itself feels imperiled and can uncertainty be a form of faith rather than its absence?

Anchored in the author’s return home to Memphis during her father’s final year as a United Methodist minister, the book unfolds as both personal reckoning and cultural inquiry. Park does not seek tidy conclusions; instead, she allows ambiguity to breathe. Her essays explore how religious inheritance collides with climate grief, motherhood, and the slow erosion of certainty, especially within the Southern landscapes that shaped her early understanding of belief.

The strength of this collection lies in its attentiveness to place, to history, and to contradiction. From wetlands and conservation cemeteries to replicas of Noah’s Ark and the reenactment of the Scopes Monkey Trial, Park examines how faith traditions both resist and respond to ecological collapse. She treats belief systems not as static doctrines, but as living, evolving frameworks through which people attempt to make meaning amid loss.

Park’s prose is lyrical without excess, reflective without indulgence. She writes with compassion for religious communities even as she interrogates their limitations, and with reverence for the natural world without romanticizing its fragility. The illustrations woven throughout the essays deepen the contemplative experience, reinforcing the book’s themes of observation, care, and attention.

World Without End will resonate with readers of environmental nonfiction, spiritual memoir, and essay collections that sit at the intersection of belief and ecology. It is a book for those living with climate anxiety, religious inheritance, or both and for anyone seeking a more honest, open ended way to hold faith in a changing world.

[Laura Hoffman Brauman · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most meaningful books that I read about faith are the ones that speak to the value of the questions rather than the certainty of the answers. In Park's collection of essays, she writes about her experiences and connections to faith, often in the ways that intersects with climate change, the natural world, and the political elements in our society. She grew up as the daughter of a Methodist preacher. As an adult, going to church wasn't part of her regular routine until her father announced his upcoming retirement and she returned home to experience/participate in his last year serving as a pastor - and her primary connection to faith. While she grew up in a more progressive path in Christianity (or at least one that saw science and faith as compatible and not in conflict), her husband grew up in an evangelical faith and provides insight into the differences between their backgrounds in the south. I found her reflections on faith and our world today to be thought provoking and contemplative. I picked this up because I saw it described as "if you like Margaret Renkl, you'll like this" - and I agree with that sentiment. There is a thoughtfulness to her writing and a way of finding connections with the natural world that worked particularly well for me.

[Sophie · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 rounded up.

Park's perspective as the daughter of a progressive Methodist pastor was great framing because it allows her to explore a range of concepts - religious fundamentalism, doomsday thinking, climate change - as both an insider and outsider. A lot of people who have left religion will see themselves in this memoir, as Park tries to reconcile science and faith and grapple with the ways mainstream religion actually contributes to harmful attitudes towards the environment.

However, I think I was just in the wrong headspace for this one. I preferred the chapters that were more information - the essays on the Creation Museum and Arc Encounter, the ivory-billed woodpecker and natural burials. Like most essay collections, some essays are better than others and I was just looking for something a little more informative, rather than dealing in personal experience so much. it was a bit of a contrast to the chapters that focus more on personal narrative. Is that fair to critique when the book is a memoir? Probably not, but nobody reads these reviews anyway and I don't owe anyone an explanation of how I review books.

[DemitraxLune · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I know it's supposed to be sad, how time opens and slams doors in Connie's mind. But the way time moves for Connie seems also kind of beautiful. The years collapse, accordion-style, and stories she's never told appear unbidden and can't be held back. Maybe, I think, this is one of the gifts of the threshold Connie has waited so long to pass through. The veil falls away, the walls she's built up collapse; she can be her many selves, all at once."

[Lramsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully written book, so carefully crafted. Full of honest, thoughtful, personal, meditative essays that wrestle with faith and doubt as we move through these often despairing days of environmental collapse, political and religious turmoil. I am so moved by this book and grateful to Martha Park for writing and illustrating a book that does not turn away from the darkness around us but refuses to surrender hope.

[Melissa Yeakley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a balm.

“In my conversations with people trying to save the torreya [tree], I noticed specific moments in which they seemed hopeful for the tree’s future. But, perhaps more often, they seemed to do the work without much hope at all. Instead, the work itself was its own remedy against despair, against assuming that all was already lost.”

[Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a really beautifully written and compiled collection of essays. I don’t know Martha personally but we’ve encountered each other on Insta as both Memphis writers. I love the topics she explores here, the intersection between faith environment, life, death, birth, and climate apocalypse. I read this very slowly, but I feel it’s meant to be read that way, digested.

[Grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

MARTHA!!!
one of the best books I’ve read this year

Between the sincere wrestling with faith, the strange pains that come with loving nature in the south, the crystalline vulnerability, and the luscious references, this essay collection was designed in a lab for me

[Kailin Richardson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m sad to finish these essays. Park writes with such genuine curiosity at the end of the world. It’s strange to have so much and so little in common, coming from very different versions of spirituality. I had a gut-deep wish that we could be friends every time I picked up the book.

[Mary Ardery · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am on the third essay and already loving this book. Its honesty gives me hope and reminds me of this Wendell Berry quote: "Be joyful though you have considered all the facts."

[Caroline Carrico · Rating 5 out of 5]

Park's essays move seamlessly from personal reflections to theological insights to in-depth reporting. The result is a unique, hopeful exploration of this time in the American South.

[Katie Raines · Rating 5 out of 5]

I savored this book as long as I could. What a gift.

[Daniel Ford · Rating 5 out of 5]

A phenomenal collection essays about the uneasy intersections between faith, climate change and the Sputh.

[Michelle Scully · Rating 5 out of 5]

gosh this was incredible

[Hailey · Rating 4 out of 5]

SO interesting I love apocalypse books and this was everything I wanted

[Trice Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful book, big fan of it. The FlorEden story is super unique and her illustrations really tie it all together

[Rachel Welcher · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book will heal your religious trauma while also convincing you that climate change is real.

[grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

I LOVED THIS <3 so many incredible essays and interesting intersection between faith and the climate crisis!