This chapter focuses on the novel of the twenty-first century to suggest that we are seeing now a new way of understanding the forms in which the novel pictures the world. The chapter opens with an exploration of the terms in which climate change and advances in the medical creation of artificial life have together shifted our understanding of the relationship between nature and culture. In light of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s argument that the eco-crisis sees the collapse of culture into nature, the chapter suggests that the contemporary novel is involved in the picturing of a world that becomes thinkable when the opposition between nature and culture has been overcome. It then goes on to read this new kind of world picturing, as it comes to expression in twenty-first-century novels by three of the major writers of the contemporary novel – Margaret Atwood, J. M. Coetzee and Don DeLillo. It is possible to see in these writers, the chapter argues, the culmination of the prosthetic imagination as I have traced it through the history of the novel, a culmination in which the capacity to picture the world is won from the novel’s intimacy with the resistance of our bodies and environments to the forms in which we seek to make them imaginable and habitable.

Distinctively Catholic voices have contributed to public debate over the patenting of human life from its very beginnings (since the Supreme Court’s landmark 1980 Chakrabarty decision). This essay reviews these contributions and assesses them in light of Audrey Chapman’s recent criticism that, in general, religious contributions to the debate over gene patenting have been intermittent, fragmented, and less interested in shaping actual patent law and policy, especially in the US, than in mounting a “prophetic” critique of what are taken to be the various problematic political, social, and economic assumptions undergirding such law and policy. In response to Chapman’s critique, the essay demonstrates how a theologically coherent and ethically rigorous contribution to the public debate over gene patenting–one that is not exclusively “prophetic”–can be discerned in the work of two influential Catholic theologians, Lisa Sowle Cahill and Cathleen Kaveny. Going beyond both Cahill and Kaveny, and in contrast to the widely shared assumptions about divine ownership that underlie their (and most other) theological contributions to this debate, the essay proposes that recapturing the late Herbert McCabe’s point that God literally owns nothing would allow the formulation of a more adequate theological contribution to the bioethical debate over gene patenting.