Seeing Nature as a Historian of Religions with Mary Evelyn Tucker

Learning How to See with Brian McLaren

Center for Action and Contemplation

Christianity, Religion & Spirituality

4.8 • 748 Ratings

🗓️ 24 October 2024

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What story do you tell yourself about the interconnectedness of nature and culture? In this episode, we’re learning to see nature through the lens of a historian of religions. Brian McLaren is joined in conversation by Mary Evelyn Tucker, a leading voice in the field of religion and ecology. Together, they discuss the importance of cultural history, the challenges of interreligious dialogue, and the urgent need for a new story that integrates science and spirituality. They also explore the life and legacy of Thomas Berry, a visionary Catholic priest, who revolutionized our understanding of nature, culture, and the universe. Mary also shares her personal journey, her partnership with John Grim, and the profound impact of Berry’s teachings on her life. About the guest: Mary Evelyn Tucker is co-director with John Grim of the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology. They are affiliated faculty with the Yale Center for Environmental Justice at the Yale School of the Environment. They organized 10 conferences on World Religions and Ecology at Harvard and were series editors for the 10 resulting volumes from Harvard. Her research area is Asian religions and she co-edited Confucianism and Ecology, Buddhism and Ecology, and Hinduism and Ecology. Resources: The transcript for this episode can be found here. Brian referenced two of his books, Life After Doom and The Galapagos Islands. Check out Journey of the Universe, Mary’s multimedia project with Brian Swimme here. Check out Yale’s Forum on Religion and Ecology here. Thomas Berry was mentioned significantly in this episode. You can learn more about him here. Find out more about musician April Stace here. Note: Brian refers to Dr. Tucker as a theologian in the episode, but she clarifies that she is actually a historian of world religions. Connect with us: Have a response to Brian's call to action at the end of this episode, or a question in general? Email us: podcasts@cac.org Send us a voicemail: cac.org/voicemail We'll be accepting questions for our Listener Questions episode until November 20th, 2024.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I was brought up in a Christian environment, and I was exposed to many, many theologians,
0:12.2	both from Christian history, past centuries, and then in the 20th century in which I grew up.
0:20.4	And I look back now, and I realize that my theological tradition
0:24.6	focused on a few theologians who we liked and celebrated
0:28.5	and we studiously ignored, we were completely ignorant of
0:33.7	or we didn't think they were worth mentioning,
0:36.0	another whole long list of theologians.
0:38.9	And what's happened to me in my life, later in my life, is that I've discovered many of
0:45.6	those theologians that we were taught to avoid, and they've become so important in my own
0:51.7	life and thought and spirituality. And one of them was a Catholic
0:57.5	priest and theologian, although he didn't call himself a theologian. His name was Father Thomas
1:04.0	Barry. And he preferred to call himself a geologian because he felt that a theology of God must be integrated with a deep reverence for
1:16.1	the earth. And so he mashed those words of theology and geology together and described himself
1:23.6	as a geologian, seeing the sacredness of the earth.
1:30.4	And he saw the crisis of how we treat and live with the earth as the greatest crisis of our
1:37.9	time. And he felt that any theology that didn't address this most existential of all of our crises was a theology
1:48.8	that was in many ways not only wasting our time, but distracting us from what we really needed
1:55.4	to pay attention to. And I want to read you a sentence from Thomas Berry. The deepest crises experienced by any society
2:07.5	are those moments of change when the story becomes inadequate for the survival demands of a present
2:17.1	situation.
2:19.4	Now, what he's saying is that we all have a story, a cosmic story in which we situate ourselves,
2:25.7	a story of what's going on in the world, what's the world about, what's life about,
	...

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