Thomas Berry and the New Cosmology:
Cunningham, Lawrence S
CREATING A WHOLE-EARTH THEOLOGY THOMAS BERRY AMD THE NEW COSMOLOGY Edited by Anne Lonergan and Caroline Richards Twenty-Third Publications, $7.95, 112 pp. Lawrence S. Cunningham Thomas Berry is...
...Ordained a Passionist priest in the early 1940s, he studied Chinese in Peking in the early fifties...
...Nonetheless, Berry should not be dismissed as a counter-cultural crank...
...This slim volume contains three pieces from Berry and a number of responses, some of them critical, to his work...
...This slim volume is a first formal step in providing a critique for Berry whose provocative ideas are, at the very least, worthy of serious consideration...
...Widely read in the religious traditions of the world, Berry has been busy attempting to construct a planetary theology which would do justice to the broadest insights of contemporary science (e.g., the "anthropic principle" in cosmology, or James Lovelock's "Gaia hypothesis") and the sapiential traditions of the world's religions...
...He carries on the project of Teilhard and others by attempting to think theologically on the macro level...
...REVEREND JOSEPH A. KOMONCHAK teaches theology at the Catholic University of America in Washington...
...REVIEWERS KENNETH JAMESON is a professor of economics and a Fellow of the Helen Kellogg Institute of International Studies at Notre Dame...
...He publishes in journals infrequently, preferring to issue papers from his center in Riverdale, New York...
...Today he spends the better part of his time thinking, reading, and writing as a freelance intellectual...
...It is in that process of criticism that the gold separates from the dross...
...REVEREND MICHAEL J. HIMES is associate professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame...
...LAWRENCE S. CUNNINGHAM is professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame.ty of Notre Dame...
...There is one significant and critically important way in which Berry differs from Teilhard...
...Gregory Baum is surely right in noting the hopeless romanticism involved in the rejection of all existing political stratagems in favor of the political agenda of the "Greens...
...He rarely shows up at conferences, symposia, and other such intellectual tribal rites...
...Berry can set out his ideas without the fear of censorship and have them criticized by his peers...
...Lawrence S. Cunningham Thomas Berry is one of those thinkers in American Catholicism who has worked and written at the margin of the academic and ecclesiastical worlds...
...is very one-sided with its reading of the transcendent Yahweh as desacralizing the universe...
...gained a doctorate in history...
...Donald Senior points out that a view of the Bible espoused by Berry (following, among others, Lynn White, Jr...
...It should not surprise us to learn that he is deeply interested in, and an expositor of, the thinking of the late Pierre Teilhard de Chardin...
...I also resist some of the more apocalyptic pronun-ciamentos like those of the Club of Rome reports (cited with approval by Berry...
...Like some of the contributors, I am less sanguine than Berry about our being on the edge of a paradigm shift in which we are slowly moving to a new era of ecological consciousness...
...When so much theology is parochial in its orientation and bloodless in its relation to the world, this is both a hope-filled and encouraging sign...
...James Farris (the only non-Roman Catholic contributing to this volume) argues against a too ready dismissal of the category of redemption in favor of a creation theology...
...held various academic posts including a professorship at Fordham University...
Vol. 115 • October 1988 • No. 18
