World Without End - (Cold Mountain Fund) by Martha Park (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Nonfiction Finalist, Willie Morris Awards
Tennessee Book Award Finalist in Nonfiction
2025 Foreword Indies Honorable Mention for Essays
Best of 2025: Top 10 Adult, Foreword Reviews
A Garden & Gun Favorite Book of 2025

For fans of Margaret Renkl and 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 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.

Review Quotes

"Precise and searching. Enormously intimate and rigorously reported." --Molly McCully Brown, author of Places I've Taken My Body

"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. It is rarer still when that voice--its questions and ideas--are so vividly embodied, so intimately involved with the sensory world. I have been raving about this book since I finished reading its exquisite and devastating final lines. As the title suggests, I suspect World Without End will endure long past the season of its birth, moving and engaging readers for years to come." --Lisa Wells, author of Believers

"It's hard to imagine a more trustworthy guide through the terrain of faith and doubt in this era of ecological catastrophe than Martha Park. Her illustrations, like her writing, are clear-eyed, carefully observed, fully of this world, yet mysteriously transcendent. This is a book to treasure." --Arwen Donahue, author of Landings: A Crooked Creek Farm Year

"In elegant and exacting prose, Martha Park draws readers into the white southern Christianity of preppers and young earth creationists--but also of her progressive, renegade pastor-father. Compassionate but unflinching, Park shows us what faith can do when practiced with empathy instead of fear. An important new voice, and World Without End is a much needed reckoning." --Cameron Dezen Hammon, author of This Is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession

"Rarely have I tucked in so hungrily to an essay collection, felt so welcomed. These pieces, beautifully connected to one another yet wide-reaching in terms of idea and question and observation, are held gently in their places by Martha Park's tender illustrations and vulnerability. Weeks on, I still haven't stopped thinking about it." --Ella Frances Sanders, author of Everything, Beautiful: A Guide to Finding Hidden Beauty in the World

"A gorgeous exercise in open theology, Martha Park's essay collection World Without End ponders climate change, social inequities, family, and religion. Her collection places generosity, curiosity, and the desire to make the world better at its fore. The collection is illuminating throughout [and] excavates ultimate meaning from care shown toward the earth and other people." --Michelle Anne Shingler, Foreword Reviews, Starred Review

"[Park's] stories are immersive, making readers feel as though they are reading a personal diary. Though writing about the apocalypse can hardly be called cheerful, Park's message--of community, hope, and finding faith through questioning what it all means--makes for a missive of light that shines brightly amid otherwise consuming darkness." --Carrie Rasak, Booklist

"A dazzling new memoir. Martha Park's unforgettable World Without End is a master class on how sharing the most particular and personal details can have the ironic effect of revealing universal truths. She does so through beautiful essays and illustrations. By narrowing in on her childhood memories and questions about motherhood, and then zooming out to gorgeous observations of the South's mountains and coasts, she asks, as perhaps we all do, how to find a foothold in the wilds of life." --CJ Lotz Diego, Garden & Gun

"A deeply felt and carefully investigated collection about faith and science. Park explores opposing worldviews within the Christian church and the science community, using incisive research on biodiversity and belief systems alike to link these essays that weave the personal, the political, and the sacred. Empathetic and precise." --Lou Turner, Chapter 16

"Park deftly weaves journalism, philosophical and theological writings, and personal experience into a keenly observed discussion of the modern experience of the American South that never veers into stereotype or finger-pointing." --Rebecca Brody, Library Journal

"Across each of these vulnerable essays, Park offers no definitive path forward. What each essay points to is unending change. This book is needed. Instead of sharing hard-and-fast edicts, the kind desired by those with a fundamentalist frame of mind, Park advocates for courage and conversation. When we, too, ask questions about life, death, parenting, the climate, God, and how to be a good human, she is generous enough to tell us a hard truth: there are no answers. But knowing, and even understanding, isn't the goal. The task, according to Park, is not to shrink away from this difficult time, but to engage with it, to do something to make it better, and to continue...without end." --Toby LeBlanc, Southern Review of Books

"These essays are elegiac, but they are also working--with dexterity, with nuance, with tenderness--to imagine the continuation of this world. World Without End traces Park's journey toward a faith marked not by certainty but by grappling and beckons toward a future in which creatures of all kinds can thrive." --Annelise Jolley, Christian Century

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. She has received fellowships and grants from the Religion & Environment Story Project, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

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.