Thomas Berry

Another friend has crossed the threshold into the light of another place. I received the following from EnlightenNext magazine. You can find them at enlightennext.org.

Quote:

“A Tribute to Thomas Berry

The renowned eco-theologian Thomas Berry died in the early morning of June 1st at the distinguished age of 94. Even though we never met Berry, many of our contributors and close friends were deeply inspired by his life and work, including leading evolutionary thinkers like Brian Swimme, Mary Evelyn Tucker, Michael Dowd, and Connie Barlow. Berry was greatly influenced by the evolutionary cosmology of French Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. A Catholic priest himself, Berry will be best remembered for helping the religious traditions to recognize the ecological crisis as a deeply spiritual issue”.

I knew Thomas Berry. I had that privilege through an environmental organization, which we both embraced and would occasionally meet for gatherings and board meetings.

He was/is an extraordinary thinker. When we connected on an irregular basis he was in his seventies. He was cogent, alert, profound, brilliant and dedicated to his passion of proving that the amalgamation of ecology and spirituality is a must for humankind to embrace as a truth.

He once said to me, “Descartes killed the world”, I suppose Berry was referring to Descartes denial that consciousness could be attributed to animals in order to explain their behavior and perhaps even to a suspected denial that the planet embodied sentientness.

In any event Berry was as a profound a thinker as was Descartes and probably more so since Berry had the advantage of the proofs of modern science. Thomas Berry will be missed and I am honored to have known him.