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

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Columbia University Press, 2009 - Nature - 181 pages
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.
 

Contents

Traditional Religion in the Modern World 1972
3
Religion in the Global Human Community 1975
18
Alienation 1974
35
Historical and Contemporary Spirituality 1975
49
The Spirituality of the Earth 1979
69
Religion in the Twentyfirst Century 1993 1996
80
Religion in the Ecozoic Era 1993
88
Its Religious Implications 1994
103
The Cosmology of Religions 1994 1998
117
An Ecologically Sensitive Spirituality 1996
129
The Universe as Divine Manifestation 2001
141
The Sacred Universe 1998 2001
152
Notes
179
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