Conference Highlights

• Keynote by Mary Evelyn Tucker, Managing Trustee of the Thomas Berry Foundation and Co-Director of the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale University
  
  
• Presentation of the Inaugural Thomas Berry Great Work Award
  
  
• Plenaries
  
  
• Student and Faculty Inter and Multi-Disciplinary Poster Session
  
  
• Lunch Social

The Environmental Consortium's conference also honored Father Thomas Berry whose teachings inspired the formation of the Environmental Consortium in 2004. The Great Work is his masterpiece. In it, he wrote that the next Great Work is to transform our hostile relationship with Earth into a new, ecologically-centered mission. He saw a special role for higher education, which he believed is the only of society’s institutions that offers the multiple disciplines, the critical capacity and the duty to community necessary to change humanity's destructive environmental course.

In his book, The Great Work, Thomas Berry writes in the introduction, “Of the institutions that should be guiding us into a viable future, the university has a special place because it teaches all those professions that control the human endeavor.”  He continues in “The University” chapter: “…that the religions are too pious, the corporations too plundering, the government too subservient to provide any adequate remedy.  The universities, however, should have the insight and the freedom to provide the guidance needed by the human community. The universities should also have the critical capacity, the influence over the other professions and the other activities of society.” 

This conference examined what it would look like if Fr. Berry’s vision was realized and the university fully embraced a role in reorienting the human-nature relationship.