The Sacred Universe: Earth, Spirituality and Religion in the Twenty-First Century. By Thomas Berry

Abstract

It would be difficult to overestimate the role Thomas Berry has played forging a conversation between religion and ecology. Ordained a Passionist priest in 1942, then becoming a scholar of Chinese and Indian cultural and religious traditions, Berry has been the most fervent and articulate spokesman for a coming together of the world's faith traditions around the healing of Earth. Over a career that spanned nearly seven decades (Berry died in 2009 at age ninety-four), Berry made contributions to fields as diverse as theology, comparative religion, cultural history, cosmology, and ecology. His wide learning and his revealing analysis of cultural trends—most notably in the 1990 publication of The Dream of the Earth—enabled him to open lines of insight and paths of inquiry that have put all of us in his debt. The Sacred Universe is a collection of essays, selected and edited by Mary Evelyn Tucker, that enable us to chart the development of major themes in the last three decades of Berry's life. Themes surveyed include alienation, the new cosmology, and the task of religions in the future. Some of them—from the 1970s—began as the “Riverdale Papers,” while later ones were written after Berry had retired from teaching at Fordham and directing the Riverdale Center of Religious Research. When encountering the essays, one is struck by the clarity of analyses showing humanity's destructive antagonism toward the Earth. In them we observe the gradual evocation of a vision in which this antagonism is overcome so that we can live in harmony and peace on our planetary home. We witness the refinement of a plea for religions to move from their anthropocentric to their cosmological phase.