Filmed in 1992. Released on November 9, 2024, Thomas Berry’s 110 birthday.
This video was filmed in Ojai, California in 1992, just after the release of The Universe Story volume, and sponsored by the Center for Respect of Life and Environment (CRLE), a Board of the US Humane Society. In this conversation, Thomas Berry shares his planetary wisdom with Mary Evelyn Tucker (Yale University) and Christopher Key Chapple (Loyola Marymount University) in a serene garden setting. Thomas reflects on his collaboration with Brian Thomas Swimme to write The Universe Story (1992), an integral narrative of our cosmic journey across 13.8 billion years. This journey is marked by what he calls “moments of grace”—the precise expansion of the early Universe; the explosions of first-generation stars gathering into galaxies; the emergence of photosynthesis. Forged across deep time, the human emerges from these transformations as a “stupendous being” with an “enormous role in the Universe.” For Thomas, we find ourselves now in a new moment of grace—a time of ecological breakdown, and yet, a time of creativity to usher in a more flourishing phase of Earth history.
