One ordinary evening in March 2023, while serving spaghetti at the family dinner table, Timothy Morton experienced a road-to-Damascus moment. “I palpably ‘saw’ that my whole life had been a prodigal-son-style cosmic joke,” the Rice University English professor writes in Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology, published earlier this year. “I thought I had been transcending Christianity in the most decisive ways possible, only to find that the last thirty-seven years had been training me to receive a massive (I mean, massive) dose of it.”Morton, who is 56 and uses they/them pronouns, considered themself a Buddhist for much of their adult life. Between writing 25 books—on subjects ranging from Romantic poetry to ecological philosophy—they had been on a spiritual journey out of a childhood…