Description: A leading scholar, cultural historian, and Catholic priest who spent more than fifty years writing about our engagement with the Earth, Thomas Berry possessed prophetic insight into the rampant destruction of ecosystems and the extinction of species. In this book he makes a persuasive case for an interreligious dialogue that can better confront the environmental problems of the twenty-first century. These erudite and keenly sympathetic essays represent Berry's best work, covering such issues as human beings' modern alienation from nature and the possibilities of future, regenerative forms of religious experience. Asking that we create a new story of the universe and the emergence of the Earth within it, Berry resituates the human spirit within a sacred totality.
Brief description: Mary Evelyn Tucker (PhD, Jananese Confucianism, Columbia) is Senior Lecturer and Research Scholar at the Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Department of Religious Studies, and the Divinity School. She directs the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale with her husband, John Grim. She is also Research Associate at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard. She is the author of several books, including Worldly Wonder: Religions Enter Their Ecological Phase (Open Court, 2003) and The Philosophy of Qi (Columbia, 2007). She is the editor of several of Thomas Berry's books, including The Sacred Universe (Columbia, 2009). She is the coeditor (with Grim) of Ecology and Religion (Island, 2014) and the World Religions and Ecology series (Harvard) and (with Grim and Willis Jenkins) of the Routledge Handbook on Religion and Ecology (2016). She and Grim are the managing trustees of the Thomas Berry Foundation.
Review Quotes: Dedicated readers of ecology, theology, or religious philosophy will want to savor each one [of these essays].-- "Library Journal"