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Just now one of the significant historical roles of the primal people of the world is not simply to sustain their own traditions, but call the entire civilized world back to a more authentic mode of being.
Thomas Berry
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Thomas Berry
Age: 94 †
Born: 1914
Born: November 9
Died: 2009
Died: June 1
Author
Cultural Historian
Environmentalist
Theologian
Writer
Greensboro
North Carolina
Tradition
Traditions
Roles
Sustain
Simply
Mode
Call
Authentic
Back
Civilized
World
Significant
People
Historical
Entire
Primal
More quotes by Thomas Berry
The reduction of the earth to an object simply for human's use/ possession is unthinkable in most traditional cultures... the earth belongs to itself and to all the component members of the community.
Thomas Berry
What is clear is that the earth is mandating that the human community assume a responsibility never assigned to any previous generation...Our task at this critical moment is to awaken the energies needed to create the new world and to evoke a universal communion of all parts of life.
Thomas Berry
Our fulfillment is not in our isolated human grandeur, but in our intimacy with the larger earth community, for this is also the larger dimension of our being.
Thomas Berry
The future rests in the religious, political, economic and cultural capacity of humans to establish this larger context in which the particular traditions will find both support and fulfillment in a functional global community.
Thomas Berry
Yet we can be sure that whatever fictions exist in Wall Street bookkeeping, the earth is a faithful scribe, a faultless calculator, a superb bookkeeper we will be held responsible for every bit of our economic folly.
Thomas Berry
The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.
Thomas Berry
Once you adopt and communicate a quality policy, stick with it, live it, and protect it. You get only one chance!
Thomas Berry
We cannot discover ourselves without first discovering the universe, the earth, and the imperatives of our own being. Each of these has a creative power and a vision far beyond any rational thought or cultural creation of which we are capable.
Thomas Berry
All human activities, professions, programs, and institutions must henceforth be judged primarily by the extent to which they inhibit, ignore, or foster a mutually enhancing human/Earth relationship.
Thomas Berry
Traditions cannot themselves, simply with their own powers, do what needs to be done. These earlier experiences and accomplishments were dealing with other issues, providing guidance for different worlds than the world of the early twenty-first century.
Thomas Berry
We lose our souls if we lose the experience of the forest, the butterflies, the song of the birds, if we can't see the stars at night.
Thomas Berry
All human professions, institutions, and activities must be integral with the earth as the primary self-nourishing , self-governing and self-fulfilling community. To integrate our human activities within this context is our way into the future.
Thomas Berry
If the religious experience were simply some naive impression of the uninformed it would not have resulted in such intellectual insight, such spiritual exaltation, such spectacular religious ritual, or in the immense volume of song and poetry and literature and dance that humans have produced.
Thomas Berry
The excitement of life is in the numinous experience wherein we are given to each other in that larger celebration of existence in which all things attain their highest expression, for the universe, by definition, is a single gorgeous celebratory event.
Thomas Berry
Everything is integral and interacts with everything else. This means that nothing is itself without everything else. There is a commonality, an integrity, an intimacy of the universe with itself.
Thomas Berry
We must now understand that our own well-being can be achieved only through the well-being of the entire natural world around us.
Thomas Berry
Diversity is the magic. It is the first manifestation, the first beginning of the differentiation of a thing and of simple identity. The greater the diversity, the greater the perfection.
Thomas Berry
The child awakens to a universe. The mind of the child to a world of meaning. Imagination to a world of beauty. Emotions to a world of intimacy. It takes a universe to make a child both in outer form and inner spirit. It takes a universe to educate a child. A universe to fulfill a child.
Thomas Berry
So long as we are under the illusion that we know best what is good for the earth and for ourselves, then we will continue our present course, with its devastating consequences on the entire Earth community... We need only listen to what the Earth is telling us... the time has come when we will listen, or we will die.
Thomas Berry
Even as regards Earth we are more committed to history than to geography, more committed to time than to space. History is endless. Place is limited.
Thomas Berry