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Book Cover for: The Sacred Universe: Earth, Spirituality, and Religion in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Berry

The Sacred Universe: Earth, Spirituality, and Religion in the Twenty-First Century

Thomas Berry

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.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Columbia University Press
  • Publish Date: Sep 16th, 2009
  • Pages: 200
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.90in - 6.10in - 1.20in - 0.86lb
  • EAN: 9780231149525
  • Categories: HistoryComparative ReligionSociology of Religion

About the Author

Tucker, Mary Evelyn: - 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.

Praise for this book

Dedicated readers of ecology, theology, or religious philosophy will want to savor each one [of these essays].-- "Library Journal"
The volume is a fair encapsulation of the intellectual concerns for which Berry is best known.--Christina Peppard "Commonweal"
Thoams Berry demonstrattes in these papers the qualities he calls for: humanist vision and imagination.-- "Resurgence"
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.--Norman Wirzba "Journal of the American Academy of Religion"
The Sacred Universe is an important, inspiring compendium of the thought of a great soul and spiritually profound seeker, who cogently and consistently reminds, even after his death, that we must learn to feel at home in the universe.--Stephen B. Scharper "America"
This text will serve as an excellent introduction to [Thomas] Berry...--Peter Ellard, Siena College "The International Journal of Environmental Studies"