Abstract
Both Octavia Butler’s duology of Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) and Toni Morrison’s novel Paradise (1998) explore the creation of a reimagined future centered around spiritual liberation free of contemporary political oppression. Through her character Lauren Olamina, Butler establishes a theology where humans can shape God, presenting both influence of change and collective action to be the true forms of survival in the face of social apocalypse; the apocalypse serves as an opportunity for renewal. The opportunity is one of necessity rather than freedom, however it nevertheless forces a new form of living that drastically differs from the lived experience in the past. Similarly in Paradise, through the narrative resurrection of the Convent women after their massacre, Morrison presents a spiritual refreshment of these women as one founded in the continuous dissolution of boundaries and limits that separates each person from another. The women of the Convent, in many ways, have already faced apocalypses of their own, thereby making the Convent itself an opportunity for renewal and a second life, a paradise. I argue that both Butler and Morrison present the apocalyptic as a form of liberation that exhibits a form of existence and spiritual renewal even after what is known is destroyed. In this way, applying liberation theology, womanist process theology, and Afrofuturism to these texts demonstrates how the concept of apocalypse can be viewed as something that is spiritually and politically liberating rather than mentally and emotionally debilitating.