Annotated Bibliography
JERRY PHILLIPS; The Intuition of the Future: Utopia and Catastrophe in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Novel 1 November 2002; 35 (2-3): 299–311.
• The author of this piece calls Earthseed a “hopeful experiment in enlightened communalism…” (Philips, 2002) and elaborates on the way Butler is making a statement of faith in modernity and undoing all forms of chauvinism associated with faith in religion. In detail he also touches on examples in the novel illustrating that the concept of change leads to a dialectical view of reality, thus being a shaping factor of the Earthseed community.

Melzer, Patricia. “”All that You Touch You Change”: Utopian Desire and the Concept of Change in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents.” Femspec 3.2 (2002): 31. ProQuest. 17 Nov. 2022 .
• This piece explores the way children in the novel represent the survival of the community and how they embody the future the adults are trying to create. Melzer explains how through responsibility for others, Lauren finds meaning to life and heals internal wounds. Melzer also highlights how the children’s dependency triggers a growing solidarity among the adults. This piece connects to my question on the way the environment shapes Lauren’s principles of Earthseed which include mutual support, community, and creating and shaping God. The children can be seen as a part of God because they can be shaped and they will shape the future.

McCormack, Michael Brandon. “‘Your God Is a Racist, Sexist, Homophobic, and a Misogynist … Our God Is Change’: Ishmael Reed, Octavia Butler and Afrofuturist Critiques of (Black) American Religion.” Taylor & Francis, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14769948.2015.1131503.
• This piece dives into Afrofuturist criqtiues of contemporary Black American religion, touching on problems of difference and dominance. It examines Octavia Butler’s racially imagined future and discusses the way Butler calls the integrity of Black christianity through crafting Lauren and her dynamic with her strict baptist home and father. It also examines the way Butler imagines a vision of a black, feminist, youth, future. This article is crucial to answer my research question about what Butler is trying to say about religion through her writing.

Jos, Philip H. “Fear and the Spiritual Realism of Octavia Butler’s Earthseed.” Utopian Studies, vol. 23, no. 2, 2012, pp. 408–429., https://doi.org/10.5325/utopianstudies.23.2.0408.
• This article points out the relationship between fear and spirituality and religion and the way way crumbling orders, violence, and cruelty in history often spark intolerant religious movements with authoritarian rule in response. It explores the ways in which Parable has the same circumstances, and yet diverges from this common response of intolerant religious movement and instead creates a coherent, non dogmatic belief system focused on community and equality.

Achachelooei, Elham Mohammadi, and Carol Elizabeth Leon. “The Past and ‘Discontinuity in Religion’ in Octavia Butler’s Parables: a Feminist Theological Perspective.” Journal of Language, Literature and Culture, vol. 68, no. 2, 2021, pp. 120–137., doi:10.1080/20512856.2021.1935492.

•  This article investigates the new social order emerging from Lauren’s Earthseed. It explores the way Butler confronts the past roots of Christianity and offers a new way of thought that defies the religious racial, sexual, classist aspects that are the foundation of Christianity. The authors explore the way Lauren revives a society of free human will, change, and recognizing differences that is simultaneously crumbling around them under the pressures of inequality. This article circles back to both parts of my question regarding the environmental shaping factors for Earthseed and another one of Butler’s messages about religion in real life.