Recording from the 2019 Religion & Ecology Summit at CIIS.
https://www.ciis.edu/academics/graduate-programs/ecology-spirituality-and-religion/religion-and-ecology-summit/religion-and-ecology-summit-2019

This talk will attempt to characterize the life, thought, and influence of Thomas Berry, historian of cultures and religions, prophet of the New Story, geologian, planetary person, a Stoic man of sorrows, and an enduring inspiration.

Thomas Berry: Personal Reflections, Dr. Robert McDermott

Recording from the 2019 Religion & Ecology Summit at CIIS.
https://www.ciis.edu/academics/graduate-programs/ecology-spirituality-and-religion/religion-and-ecology-summit/religion-and-ecology-summit-2019

Mary Evelyn Tucker, PhD: “Writing A Life Story” 
Introduction from Elizabeth Allison, PhD

What does it require to tell another’s story?  What is left out? What is kept in? How do we choose?  These and other questions arose in trying to tell Thomas Berry’s story.  This talk will reflect on the challenges of composing Thomas’s biography over many years.  We will consider how this work may contribute to his legacy. In the process, we will also ponder the nature of story-telling in our times.

Writing A Life Story, Mary Evelyn Tucker, PhD

Recording from the 2019 Religion & Ecology Summit at CIIS.
https://www.ciis.edu/academics/graduate-programs/ecology-spirituality-and-religion/religion-and-ecology-summit/religion-and-ecology-summit-2019

Osprey Orielle Lake, MA: “Flaring Forth in the Anthropocene: A fierce and passionate impulse for cosmovision, and social and ecological justice” 
  
A fourfold wisdom has been described by Thomas Berry as the framework for advancing the human project for a sustainable future. Berry says: “In these opening years of the twenty-first century, as the human community experiences a rather difficult situation in its relation with the natural world, we might reflect that a fourfold wisdom is available to guide us into the future: the wisdom of indigenous peoples, the wisdom of women, the wisdom of the classical traditions, and the wisdom of science.” These wisdoms hold keys to a cosmovision for this tumultuous era. In this presentation, I will focus on two of the wisdoms, Indigenous peoples and women, as well as knowledge from the global climate justice and rights of nature movements as we delve further into the Great Work of our time—a time of peril and potential promise.

Flaring Forth in the Anthropocene, Osprey Orielle Lake, MA

Recording from the 2019 Religion & Ecology Summit at CIIS.
https://www.ciis.edu/academics/graduate-programs/ecology-spirituality-and-religion/religion-and-ecology-summit/religion-and-ecology-summit-2019

Toni Nash, CSJ, PhD: “Creating a New Language for a New Story” 
 
As we seek to integrate the New Universe Story into our daily lives, we need new images that accurately capture the universe as we now know it, how we got here, and what we humans are to do – clear images that reflect our new consciousness, guide us in daily choices, correct dysfunctional thinking and behavior, and reinvent us as a derivative species of the Earth community.  In a recent critical analysis of the “new story” movement, Lisa Sideris claims that the way we are telling the new story gives too much emphasis to science and is overtly human-centered and human-exalting. If this is true, we have failed to communicate the story as a sacred one that challenges our anthropocentric and anthropic bias and demands interdependent behavior that is aligned with Earth’s evolutionary processes.  How can we image the new story in such a way that it is unambiguous, immediately accessible, and easily embodied in our daily lives?  Might we sit around the fire and retell the story of our origins to each other until new images come to us that fully capture our new experience of the Universe?

Creating a New Language for a New Story, Toni Nash, CSJ, PhD

Recording from the 2019 Religion & Ecology Summit at CIIS.
https://www.ciis.edu/academics/graduate-programs/ecology-spirituality-and-religion/religion-and-ecology-summit/religion-and-ecology-summit-2019

Drew Dellinger, PhD: “The Most Radical Thing a Person Can Think About” 
  

The universe, Thomas Berry once said, “is the most radical thing a person can think about.” Drawing on interviews with Berry throughout the 1990s and 2000s, this talk will explore his cosmological vision, his approach to worldview, story, and narrative, and his conceptions of the Universe Story, the Earth Community, and the Great Work. This talk will also engage social and political dimensions of cosmology as a link between ecological and social justice issues.

The Most Radical Thing a Person Can Think About, Drew Dellinger, PhD

Recording from the 2019 Religion & Ecology Summit at CIIS.
https://www.ciis.edu/academics/graduate-programs/ecology-spirituality-and-religion/religion-and-ecology-summit/religion-and-ecology-summit-2019

Carl Anthony: “The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race”  
 
In this talk, Carl Anthony will discuss his book, The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race (New Village Press, 2017). This book interweaves urban history, racial justice, and cosmology with personal experiences as an architect/planner, environmentalist, and Black American. By connecting the struggles for social and racial justice to the universe story, it creates new story for our time.

The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race, Carl Anthony

Recording from the 2019 Religion & Ecology Summit at CIIS.
https://www.ciis.edu/academics/graduate-programs/ecology-spirituality-and-religion/religion-and-ecology-summit/religion-and-ecology-summit-2019

White Supremacy in Ecological Movements, a conversation between Carl Anthony and Drew Dellinger

Recording from the 2019 Religion & Ecology Summit at CIIS.
https://www.ciis.edu/academics/graduate-programs/ecology-spirituality-and-religion/religion-and-ecology-summit/religion-and-ecology-summit-2019

Steve Snider: “It Takes a Universe to Educate a Child: The Influence of Berry’s Work on Young People” 
 
This brief talk outlines my intellectual and spiritual journey from early childhood in the 1970’s through young adulthood in the 1990’s leading to the discovery of the New Cosmology and the work of Thomas Berry. With a special emphasis given to three areas of inquiry: 1) how early childhood experiences influence the passions and interests of our adult lives; and 2) how the philosophical exploration and spiritual intuitions of a young inquisitive mind can be supported and validated by the interrelatedness and non-duality presented in the work of Thomas Berry; and 3) how Thomas Berry’s work and the New Cosmology can become a blueprint for education and social transformation.

It Takes a Universe to Educate a Child: The Influence of Berry’s Work on Young People, Steve Snider

Recording from the 2019 Religion & Ecology Summit at CIIS.
https://www.ciis.edu/academics/graduate-programs/ecology-spirituality-and-religion/religion-and-ecology-summit/religion-and-ecology-summit-2019

Devin O’Dea: “Dynamizing Functional Cosmology for a Flourishing Future” 

  

The works of Thomas Berry, Brian Thomas Swimme, and Mary Evelyn Tucker have provided us with a story of the universe that is both grounded in science and animated by the insights of the humanities.  In doing so, they have articulated a thorough account of what Thomas Berry called a “functional cosmology.” What is our role in the stewardship and communication of this knowledge?  How might we dynamize the story we have inherited and contribute to its further functioning throughout our collective culture? Given the opportunities of modern technology, can we discover effective strategies to orient and share this story such that individuals of all social, economic, and educational levels can connect? In addition to exploring the concept of “functional cosmology” and its embodied forms in Journey of the Universe, The Universe Story, and other related works, we will consider how functional cosmology might be communicated to the general public in a manner that generates value and energy that further drives the dissemination of the great story of our time.

Dynamizing Functional Cosmology for a Flourishing Future, Devin O'Dea

Recording from the 2019 Religion & Ecology Summit at CIIS.
https://www.ciis.edu/academics/graduate-programs/ecology-spirituality-and-religion/religion-and-ecology-summit/religion-and-ecology-summit-2019

Dr. Elizabeth Allison, chair and founder of CIIS' Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion (ESR) program, sparks the day of presentations with an acknowledgement of the Ramaytush Ohlone land on which we stand, and a brief overview of the history of this place and the people who tended to the ecology and traditions of the region.

Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion at CIIS

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