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Vital materialism treats food, metals, electricity, and waste as participants rather than props, and Christian creation theology has fewer objections than you might expect.
What if matter is not inert? Not the food you eat, not the water in your body, not the metals in your phone, not the grid you plug it into. Jane Bennett asks that question in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010). I will argue that her answer does real work for scholar-practitioners. I make that case by following her through the blackout, the plate, and the landfill, then by pressing her against a Christian doctrine of creation that has never been comfortable with dead matter either.
Bennett's target is an inheritance she calls the dead matter assumption. Nature is a machine, bodies are mechanisms, the world is inert until a human acts on it. The assumption sends invoices. If matter is dead, politics concerns only human actors; environmental ethics collapses into a ledger of human costs and benefits; care becomes a technological problem; the only agency worth naming is ours.
Against this Bennett proposes thing-power, the capacity of things and materials to produce effects independent of human intention. She knows the claim sounds wild and she trims it carefully. She is not saying food is conscious or that metals have intentions. She is saying that vitality, the capacity to produce effects, to have trajectories, to resist or amplify, is not a human monopoly. It is distributed across the material world, and so is agency. Distributive agency spreads causation across assemblages, a term she takes from Deleuze and Guattari for configurations of human and non-human actors whose combined effects exceed the sum of the parts.
The 2003 blackout that cascaded across the northeastern United States and Canada is her best case. The standard account names human error, corporate negligence, regulatory failure. Bennett asks what happens if we take the electricity seriously as an actor: the electrons, the heat, the infrastructure, the cascading interactions of physical components, none of them passive. The event emerges from the assemblage. Her political point is double: attribute everything to human actors and you will both overblame particular humans and miss the forces actually shaping the outcome.
Food extends it. Drawing on nutritional biochemistry, Bennett argues that omega-3s, sugars, and proteins act on mood and cognition; you do not simply process food as fuel, food works on you. The boundary between my agency and the agency of my lunch is more porous than I assume. Trash and metals extend it further. Metals accumulate in soils and waters, plastics enter food chains, waste follows political and ecological trajectories nobody intended. The landfill is not where matter goes to stop mattering. It is where matter continues its life.
Adjacent voices complicate the picture. Karen Barad argues in Meeting the Universe Halfway that matter and meaning are not separate domains that later interact; they emerge together through intra-actions. Donna Haraway, no vital materialist in Bennett's sense, refuses disembodied agency all the same and insists on making kin across species lines. Elizabeth Grosz, reading Darwin with Henri Bergson, finds matter inherently excessive: it produces more than any system can predict.
Christian cosmology has never been fully at ease with dead matter. In Genesis 1 the ruach (spirit, breath, wind) hovers over the waters before anything is made, and that is not a picture of inert stuff awaiting management. The psalms have rivers clapping and mountains singing. Proverbs 8 gives Wisdom a voice and puts her at the founding of the world, delighting. The sacramental traditions insist that bread, wine, and oil carry grace. The incarnation is the maximal claim that matter matters.
The difference deserves its own respect. Bennett's frame is Spinozist rather than theistic: one substance with many modes, vitality immanent, distributed, impersonal, with no transcendent source. Constructive theologians working in Catherine Keller's orbit (the Drew Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquium, published by Fordham) say yes, and then say why. The world is alive because a living God sustains it moment by moment, a gift upheld rather than a machine wound up and abandoned.
Both sides land on the same practice. Neither domination nor sentimentality, but attention. Your buildings, food systems, devices, and waste streams are participants in your outcomes, not neutral settings. Design the study as if they were.
The Postmodern Terminal >_