We want to welcome you to this course on the worldview of Thomas Berry. As a historian, Berry pondered the connections between the stories that cultures tell of the cosmos and the discoveries of modern science. His insights helped to shape and ground the Journey Project. So, we wanted to share our personal encounters with him. For example, I came to New York to Fordham University in 1968 to study history of religions with Thomas Berry. My idea was to enter into this inter-religious dialogue and understand the complementary of religions. But what Thomas Berry opened up to me in this regard is the embeddedness of these religious traditions in cultural fabrics. And also how religions complete one another. >> I met Thomas Berry in 1975 returning from Asia where I had taught for two years in Japan. And then traveled all through many of the other countries of Asia. And in encountering these cultures, these different world religions, I needed to integrate them. I needed to understand them. So, in meeting Thomas Berry on that February afternoon, I knew that this was a teacher that I was going to be with probably the rest of my life. For the notion of seeking how to integrate our lives, find a path forward and recover from the upheavals, frankly, of the 60s with civil rights and the Vietnam War. How could we get the long-term perspective on our moment? Our historical moment in time? Thomas Berry understood this well. >> Absolute, yes. We wanted to also give you an overview of the course. And so, the first week opens with the theme of Thomas Berry as cultural historian. And as a historian, of course, he encountered many schools of thought, but he wrote his dissertation on the Historian Giambattista Vico, a 17th century Italian, a philosopher of history. And that influence stayed with him through much of his career in writing about historical subjects, especially the issue of the ages of the human and human history. Vico was keen on showing how the past influences the present. And then Barry saw how that shaping of periods of time, using the concept of ages then, affected all dimensions of that age. And so he brought that understanding to a sense of both human history, cultural history, and then an Earth history. And also, a universe history. So that's one theme we're exploring in the first week. >> Indeed, in the next week, we're going to talk about his interests in world cultures and religions, which of course shaped us as well, but Thomas had a very early interest in China. He went there in 48, 49 to study the culture and their religions. He wrote a book on India, The Religions of India, that was published in 1972. Later, he developed in keen interest in Native American traditions and had a whole library, a room of books of native traditions in his research center in Riverdale. We invite you on this week to look at the forum website on World Religions and Ecology, as well as visit the Yale Art Gallery through their website, to see this interaction of culture and religion. >> In the next week then, we take up a central theme of a major influence on Thomas Barrie's thought from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose dates are 1881 to 1955. Teilhard de Chardin was a paleontologist, a study of old life forms, especially human life forms. And he was also a Jesuit, so this interaction of evolution and religion was a struggle and a set of ideas that Teilhard was very early in exploring. And Berry interacted with that influence in a both in a appreciative way and in a critical way. So he very much appreciated especially Teilhard's sense of a story embedded in the telling of how the universe emerged. And he also had a critical take on Teilhard and his sense of the human as culminating evolution, Berry saw beyond that. But Berry also was very committed to his thought and directed the American Teilhard Association from 1974 to 1987 and we've directed it since then. So, it's helpful to look at the Teilhard websites. And that's will ask you to do both the British, French and American American websites. >> In the next week, we're going to invite you to explore this critical essay called The New Story, which has had immense influence. It was published in 78, Berry was in his early 60s. He was trying to speak about how we are caught between stories. A scientific story of evolution and religious stories from scriptures and tradition. So how can we tell, he asked, an engaging story that orients us and grounds us in our contemporary period? He wasn't calling for a singular narration of the story but realize many tellings will arise. And the influence on Journey of the Universe is very clear. We invite you this week to look at that website of the Journey of the Universe. >> In the following then, we'll take up this relationship of cosmology and ecology in the Thomas Berry's thought. And that especially relates to the new story article that you've mentioned. And his concept of new story was a holistic view of the cosmos, which is both affirming differentiation, as well as unity throughout the cosmos. So, Berry was interested in that relationship and dialog and conversation between science and the humanities. Actually, I think it was, for Berry, more than just a dialogue, but a mutually informing and enhancing conversation. >> Absolutely. In the final week of the course, we'll invite you to explore his ideas of the great work, he wrote a book of this title. And also the Ecozoic Era, which he named our era. So Berry suggests that we're in a period of transformation. He speaks of this as an Ecozoic era that requires the great work of humans. Now, by great work, he means the work that's needed for sustainability in areas such as agriculture, economics, education and policy. The Ecozoic era is what we're moving into now in relation to the Cenozoic era, the previous 65 million years of Earth history where there was a great abundance of life. And now we know that abundance is in the midst of a six extinction period. The others caused by climate change perhaps, even an asteroid, but now, by us. So he's saying, this is a definitive moment. And we're going to invite you to explore the great work in a world views journal that's devoted a whole issue to this idea. And we'll ask you to read a chapter there and to look at the emerging Earth community website to see how these various projects come together. Journey of the Universe, forum on religion and ecology, and the Earth all influenced by Thomas Berry. >> So, these sequence of weeks bring us to a understanding of the relationship that Thomas Berry's thought to the Journey of the Universe project. We've been planning this film with Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme for 40 years and more. And it's really interesting to think that Thomas was 61 years old when he wrote the story essay. And in fact much of his major work in this field was done in the latter part of his life. >> And he was 66 when he met Brian in 82. And Brian had this tremendous science training, especially on the early universe, mathematical cosmology. When Thomas came back from Chicago where Bryan was teaching, he walked in the door of the Riverdale Center and he said, I met my Plato, [LAUGH] someone who could help translate this work of Socrates so to speak. And he realized that a new dialogue of science and humanity, this conversation that he would carry on for many years, we on the humanity side and Brian on the science side. Brian was on fire with his desire to tell the universe story. And in addition to Teilhard's fast evolutionary perspective, Brian was also inspired by Whitehead who said in his last public lecture, it's impossible to fully understand anything without reference to its infinite background. This was Brian's passion and Thomas' commitment as well. >> Another seminal and significant influence on from Berry's thought on the Journey Project has been the book that he did with Brian Swimme, The Universe Story. This is a real milestone in the project. Brian and Thomas worked on that book for ten years. And they brought together scientist and historians with whom they consulted. In fact, in 1990, in California, they held a conference in which participants were invited, critiqued, and helped build the ideas. And so, this influence came to the Journey Project, which itself is another ten year project. And we've also gathered with scientists and we've spent many summers at the Whidbey Institute on Whidbey Island off the coast of Seattle. And we had scientists read chapters of the Journey book relevant to their disciplines. And we were asking them to help us in joining scientific facts with poetic metaphors so that people could really understand and enter into this story more deeply. >> So Berry followed the process of the book but especially of making the film. We visited him after a filming, told him the stories, we laughed over the challenges we were facing. He saw a rough cut of the film into 2009, some months before he died. He encouraged us to the end. We hope you will find inspiration from his life and his thought as well.
