In these penetrating and beautifully wrought essays, Martha Park employs her many identities—artist, naturalist, southerner, mother, preacher’s daughter astray—to investigate profound questions about faith and the fate of our planet. It is rare to find a voice like this: at once vulnerable and rigorous, skeptical and compassionate, commanding and humble in the presence of mystery.” – Lisa Wells, author of Believers: Making a Life at 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.
About the author
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. 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.
About the conversation partner
John T Edge is the author of The PotLikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South, named a best book of 2017 by NPR, Publisher‘s Weekly, and a host of others. For twenty-two years, he served as a columnist for the Oxford American, and for three years he wrote the United Tastes column for the New York Times. He is director of the Mississippi Lab in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Mississippi, where his projects include the launch of Greenfield Farm Writers Residency, set
on a parcel of land outside Oxford where William Faulkner once raised mules. From 1999 through 2021, he was director of the Southern Foodways Alliance. He is also the host of the television show TrueSouth on the SEC Network, ESPN, and Hulu. He lives here in Oxford.
