Book Review: Living Cosmology: Christian Responses to the Journey of the Universe
Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim (editors), Living Cosmology: Christian Responses to the Journey of the Universe. (Orbis Books, 2016).
Mary Evelyn Tucker and spouse John Grim were introduced to readers of Tidings in the November 2020 issue. Along with others, the couple has been great advocates of engaging scholars (especially of religions) to address the imminent issue of global warming and its threat to all of God's creation including humans in the very survival of planet earth.
In 2014 they brought together more than 400 scholars and activists to Yale University to attend a Living Cosmology. Christian Response lo the Journey of the Universe conference, to celebrate the fifth anniversary of Thomas Berry's death (1914-2009) and his one-hundredth birthday.
It consisted of panels by scholars and activists, along with religious leaders and laity from the different strands of Christianity including selections from Laudato Si' On the Care of our Common Home by Pope Francis' encyclical focused on the environment, the first in the history of the Catholic Church, issued on June 18, 2015. The Foreword to the conference was given by Brian Swimme, who teaches evolutionary cosmology, and the Introduction by Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim.
Brian Swimme began by going back to antiquity when humans first beheld the mystery of the heavens and wondered about their place within the vast universe. The three thousand stars, he says, are visible to the human eye but an additional 200 billion stars behind them in the Milky Way are not. About 400 billion more are in the nearest spiral galaxy whose light traveled 2 million years to reach our straining eyes.
Furthermore, he adds that the big bang of molten rock can become either a shining ruby or a hummingbird. He further added that for all its shortcomings and distortions, modern science is one of the great revelatory events in human history: In the Axial revelations of Israel, India, China, and Greece, human understanding was altered in deep and unique ways; something similar can be said about the period that began with Copernicus in 1543 and culminated with Arno Pertzias and Robert Wilson in 1964. These four centuries permanently transformed our understanding of the cosmos, time, matter, energy, life, and consciousness.
We live in an interval similar to those earlier centuries when sensitive humans wrestled with the meanings tangled up in the Buddha, Confucius, Christ, and Krishna. It is inevitable that we, too, will need to wrestle for centuries with the meaning of a 14 billion-year of cosmic evolution.
In their Introduction Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim both claim that in recent years scientists and deconstructionists have concluded that the universe, while following certain natural laws, is largely a random and accidental accretion of material objects, with little meaning and no larger purpose. Their perspective is to counteract this view with presentation of a dynamic, emergent, self-organizing, and sacred universe. They drew heavily on the work of Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species (1859) and that of French paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. (1881-1955) who developed the Omega point (noosphere) where human creativity and consciousness are continually enhanced.
Living Cosmology stretches the horizons of the minds of Christians so that they become much more aware of the fragility of the ecosystem under the onslaught of human "progress."
— Franklin J. Woo