Brian Swimme & Thomas Berry

Brian Swimme :

Brian Thomas Swimme is on the faculty of the California Institute of Integral Studies, in San Francisco, where he teaches evolutionary cosmology to graduate students in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program. He received his Ph.D. (1978) from the department of mathematics at the University of Oregon for work in singularity theory.

Swimme was a faculty member in the department of mathematics at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, 1978–81. He was a member of the faculty at the Institute in Culture and Creation Spirituality at Holy Names University in Oakland, California, 1983–89, and is presently adjunct professor for Holy Names University's Sophia Center.

Swimme brings the context of story to our understanding of the 13.7-billion-year trajectory of cosmogenesis. His published work includes The Universe is a Green Dragon (Bear and Company, 1984), The Universe Story (Harper San Francisco, 1992), written with Thomas Berry, and The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos (Orbis, 1996). Swimme is the producer of three DVD series: Canticle to the Cosmos, The Earth’s Imagination, and The Powers of the Universe.

Thomas Berry:

Thomas Berry was a Catholic priest of the Passionist order, cultural historian and ecotheologian (although cosmologist and geologian — or “Earth scholar” — were his preferred descriptors).

Among advocates of deep ecology and "ecospirituality" he is famous for proposing that a deep understanding of the history and functioning of the evolving universe is a necessary inspiration and guide for our own effective functioning as individuals and as a species. He is considered a leader in the tradition of Teilhard de Chardin as demonstrated in the Introduction to his book, The Christian Future and the Fate of the Earth.

Author Michael Colebrook describes two key elements in Thomas Berry’s thinking: “Firstly, the primary status of the universe. The universe is, ‘the only self-referential reality in the phenomenal world. It is the only text without context. Everything else has to be seen in the context of the universe’.

The second element is the significance of story, and in particular the universe as story. ‘The universe story is the quintessence of reality. We perceive the story. We put it in our language, the birds put it in theirs, and the trees put it in theirs. We can read the story of the universe in the trees. Everything tells the story of the universe. The winds tell the story, literally, not just imaginatively. The story has its imprint everywhere, and that is why it is so important to know the story. If you do not know the story, in a sense you do not know yourself; you do not know anything.

Togehter thay makes this works:

-The Universe Story From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era, A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos

-Berry also contributed two introductory essays ('Economics: Its Effects on the Life Systems of the World' and 'The Earth: A New Context for Religious Unity') to the volume Thomas Berry and the New Cosmology, in which Brian Swimme, Caroline Richards, Gregory Baum and others discuss the implications of Berry's thought for a range of disciplines and paradigms.

-Berry's 'Twelve Principles for Understanding the Universe and the Role of the Human in the Universe Process offer a postscript to this 1987 work.