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The introduction to this volume calls for the end of “animal studies” broadly conceived as an umbrella term encompassing such diverse fields as animality studies, posthumanism, human-animal studies, critical animal studies, and species critique. While these fields attempt to move beyond the human in various ways, they often have rather different ends in mind, if not explicit conflicts with each other. Lundblad thus argues that this range of work can be characterized more productively as falling under the three general categories of human-animal studies, posthumanism, and animality studies, with a common focus on what he calls “animalities”: texts, discourses, and material relationships that construct animals, on the one hand, or humans in relation to animals, on the other hand, or both.

This introduction maps the recent “turn to the animal” in the humanities, with special reference to the field of animality studies. The catalytic role of Jacques Derrida's “The Animal That Therefore I Am” in the emergence of this field is discussed, as is Donna Haraway's important critique of the essay. Animality studies is also situated in relation to a broader phenomenon that might be termed animal theory, with roots in reflections on animality by such thinkers as Levinas, Kristeva, and Deleuze and Guattari. Also discussed is the concept of the creature in pre-Cartesian Christianity, which contrasts with Descartes's incalculably influential conception of the animal as the solitary opposite of the human. The introduction ends with reflections on the possible contours of a creaturely theology, and with summaries of the sixteen essays that make up the volume.

Tsai explores Ghosh’s novel in relation to intersecting histories of both human and nonhuman violence. Set in the tide country of the Sundarbans in Bangladesh and India, the novel dramatizes vulnerable forms of life, including endangered river dolphins and dispossessed people, threatened not only by storms and floods stemming from global warming but also by the neo-imperialist violence of the state. Tsai’s reading of the novel draws upon the concept of the Umwelt from Jakob von Uexküll, as well as the fields of animality studies, biopolitics, systems theory, and phenomenology, in order to argue for what he calls a “critical bioregionalism” in which advocacy for vulnerable places needs to be attentive to the overlapping forms and histories of violence that connect human and nonhuman inhabitants.

An Yountae and Peter Anthony Mena's jointly authored essay explores Gloria Anzaldúa's potential contributions to animality studies and creaturely theology. The essay falls into two parts. Mena shows how Anzaldúa's concept of a mestiza identity forged in the arid spaces of the U.S.-Mexican borderlands, and transcending and transforming ethnic difference and human/animal difference, can travel to a different desert in which human-animal hybrids also abound, that of Jerome's fourth-century Life of Paul. An extends Mena's reflections into a more direct exploration of the significance of the animal for Anzaldúa. He argues that Anzaldúa's animal images figure the multiple layers of her mestizaje. These images also express a dialectical tension between Anzaldúa's decolonial vision of freedom and the abyssal groundlessness of creaturely existence.

The writings of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben inform Eric Meyer's essay. Meyer rereads the Johannine prologue (John 1:1-18), the locus classicus for the doctrine of the incarnation, with Agamben and Jacques Derrida. Meyer contests the traditional assumption that the divine Logos (Word) of the prologue is aligned with human discourse. Instead, the prologue's identification of the Logos with zōē (life) aligns it with to zōon (the animal). The human rejection of the Logos that the prologue narrates is human refusal to acknowledge the animality of the divine. The prologue does not endorse the human as a categorically exceptional creature but subverts humanity from within.

Lundblad focuses on two memoirs by Terry Tempest Williams for the ways they represent an attempt in contemporary nature writing and illness memoirs to come to terms with terminal illness and the end of life. Animality is invoked in the texts as a model for constructing supposedly the right way to approach a diagnosis of cancer, suggesting what kind of death could be seen as a good one, if that might ever be possible. Williams’s two memoirs are linked by the ways they use birds and the discourse of what should be considered “natural” to explain when or how to resist not only death, but also patriarchal gender norms, imperialist U.S. aggression in the “War on Terror”, atomic testing at the Nevada Test Site, and the destruction of environments from Utah to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Lundblad’s emphasis is on how constructions of birds can naturalize problematic human discourses, but the chapter also points toward the ways that these essentialized constructions are limiting for nonhuman animals as well.​

Beatrice Marovich's essay brings Jacques Derrida's animal philosophy into dialogue with Rainer Maria Rilke's animal theology as crafted in his Stories of God and Book of Hours. For Rilke, animals have a privileged relationship to a space-time he termed The Open and through it to the divine, while humans can neither perceive nor enter The Open. Marovich explores the oblique relationship between Rilke's Open and Derrida's divinanimality—another extra-human time-space co-inhabited by gods and animals. The creaturely God that emerges in The Open finds consummate expression as the fragile bird wriggling in the praying hands of a child, signifying to the child that God is real, even though God must disappear when the prayer is over.

Imperial Rome is figured in the Book of Revelation as a thērion, a “beast” or “wild beast.” Stephen D. Moore's essay begins by reading Jacques Derrida's The Beast and the Sovereign, together with The Animal That Therefore I Am, as commentary on Revelation's theological bestiary: its Beast, its beastlike God, its animal Christ. Moore then considers the interspecies intimacy of the Lamb and its Bride, and ponders the Bride's transformation into a heavenly megalopolis that is a continent-sized shopping mall with a single stream and a token tree. Throughout, Moore attempts to relate what Revelation has to say about nonhuman animals—and category-crossing creatures that are neither human, animal, nor divine—to the plight of nonhuman animals in our apocalyptically theriocidal world.

Jay McDaniel and J. Aaron Simmons's jointly authored essay begins with an extended appraisal of Continental philosophy's engagement with the question of the animal. Simmons raises two major objections to Continental philosophy's ability to address animal welfare, what he terms the Secondary Status Objection (epitomized by the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas) and the Inadequate Activism Objection (epitomized by the philosophy of Jacques Derrida), before highlighting what he regards as more animal-positive developments in Continental philosophy. McDaniel continues by setting out in terms of six core ideas the potential of A. N. Whitehead's process thought to foster a post-anthropocentric sensitivity to the subjectivity, beauty, spirituality, and intrinsic value of animals, and encourage the ethical treatment of them.

Denise Kimber Buell's essay asks what kind of creaturely theology might arise from reflection on microbial and bacterial interactions, such as in the human digestive system, rather than on the interactions of large-scale organisms. Buell argues that reflecting on invisible or near-invisible agencies, such as pneuma and microbes, has the potential to catalyze a creaturely theology that is also a relational ontology, one that conceives of all living beings as complex interacting systems. She finds theological models for such viscously porous ontologies in certain ancient Christian texts (the Gospels of John, Philip, and Thomas; Irenaeus's Against Heresies), notwithstanding the apparently contradictory fact that these texts also evince anxiety about the boundaries of the human.

In this essay, Glen A. Mazis descends deeply into Jacques Derrida's The Animal That Therefore I Am and The Beast and the Sovereign, writing after Derrida but also with and beyond Derrida. In this task, Mazis is aided by Jean-Christophe Bailly and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In the second half of his essay, Mazis takes up Derrida's discourse on the wolf as a traditional figure of human rapacity, and pushes beyond that discourse to engage with the history of human predation on the wolf. That horrific history, for Mazis, is emblematic of a systematic misrecognition that has turned the animal world into a world that humans no longer know how to inhabit or even to see.

Jennifer Koosed and Robert Paul Seesengood's jointly authored essay plunges us into one of the most animal-populous books of the Bible. The first half of the essay ponders four encounters that the Book of Daniel's eponymous hero has with animals. Each encounter entails transformation from human to animal either enacted (Nebuchadnezzar into grazing animal; empires into hybrid monsters) or denied (Daniel into lion), and each entails a revelation of what Jacques Derrida has termed divinanimality. The second half of the essay brings postcolonial themes into dialogue with animality themes across the catastrophe-ridden space of the Book of Daniel. Aided by Giorgio Agamben and Donna Haraway, the authors reflect on how this apocalypse consigns entire human populations to the category of the killable in a logic that relies on the killability of the animal.

Ken Stone's essay takes one dog in particular as its point of departure, that in Emmanuel Levinas's “The Name of a Dog,” an essay that has acquired unprecedented significance with the emergence of animality studies. Stone notes how Levinas's tale of Bobby, the Nazi labor-camp dog, begins and ends with reference to two differently positioned groups of dogs in the Book of Exodus. Stone picks up where Levinas leaves off, following the intricate tracks of the dogs and other nonhuman animals though Exodus and other biblical literature, aided by Jacques Derrida, and demonstrating how complex, and occasionally non-anthropocentric, are biblical representations of “the animal.”

Jacob J. Erickson's essay picks up Jacques Derrida's passing reference in The Animal That Therefore I Am to “a negative zootheology” and elaborates it. At issue, for Erickson, is the traditional theological insistence on treating human beings as the privileged revelation of the divine (“created in the image of God”). Erickson contests this human exceptionalism by proposing a negative zootheology that does not cordon off nonhuman animality in order to image the divine. He follows Derrida in refusing to think “the animal” in undifferentiated terms, leading to a wild profusion of creaturely singularities that enable a radical reimagining of the biblical and theological trope of “wilderness.” The Spirit becomes a wild immanence in creaturely life, while God becomes a creaturely imaging of the “divine wilderness” of the Spirit.

Kate Rigby's essay extends Donna Haraway's “respectful curiosity” to undomesticated animal others, epitomized for Rigby by the magpie, a familiar sight and sound in her corner of Australia. Throughout her essay, Rigby urges human attention to the semiosis of the more-than-human world. Ultimately she asks us to ponder how nonhuman animals might be considered to be calling upon humans in the context of the current humanly engendered mass extinction event. She notes that animal oracles, not least bird oracles, have abounded in many traditional cultures, and narrates a dream in which a magpie plays an ecoprophetic role. The magpie's call, summoning human beings of out solipsistic self-enclosure, sounds on behalf of the innumerable voiceless or silenced creatures who are in the frontline of environmental devastation.

Laura Hobgood-Oster's essay contests the assumption, embedded in Christian theology and western philosophy, that words position humans as superior to animals. A corrective to that assumption is provided by sacred stories of speaking animals—stags, asses, dogs, lions…—who break into the closed human circle of the word. They demonstrate an animal connection to the divine that has no need of human intermediaries. When such animals speak, divine-animal-human voices merge in a moment of what Jacques Derrida might call divinanimality. Yet Hobgood-Oster also take Derrida to task, following Donna Haraway, for not being curious about what his cat was communicating to him, in contrast to the apostles Peter and Paul in the speaking animal tales in which they feature.

Erika Murphy's essay begins with reflection on the anecdote Hélenè Cixous tells in Stigmata of being bitten by a dog as a child. This deep bite was an epiphany of “the meat we are,” yet also emerged out of the animal's suffering. The dog becomes Job and Christ for Cixous. For Murphy, Cixous's reflections open up crucial aspects of the Johannine Jesus' corporality as flesh to be devoured and sacrificial animal. Murphy proceeds to add layer upon layer to this corporeal Christology, concluding that the call to consume Christ is an invitation to recognize the shared vulnerability of human and animal flesh, a vision that takes us to the brink of transcendence. Consumed by the animal, the human develops a taste for the divine.