Customer Reviews

The Great Work: Our Way into the Future

5 star:		(5)
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2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Most people who love the Earth and fear its demise will relate to and devour this book. You may labor at times, but the fruit is abundant. You'll understand more clearly the deep causes in our cultural evolution that have put the Earth at risk. The solution is an immense undertaking, but Berry reminds us there's hope, and that we aren't alone. The human community, and more importantly, the larger life/Earth/Universe community, is available and at work, in us. How can it not be, when it was those communities from which we came? The developing universe, as Berry writes. When you adequately understand the causes of the problems, when you can identify them both outside and within, you move in a better direction. Berry provides an un-numbered, un-listed direction, one that is heard with more than the rational mind. Yet, he articulates better than I could have imagined. He gives an immense hope and guides toward that most important of all energies at this time, the psychic energy necessary for confronting and walking forward, for preparing oneself for real action, real work. That is a big thing. If you have wrung your hands at the seeming impossibility of correcting the wrongs done to the Earth, read this book. Berry doesn't give you concrete things to do, his words work into your creative area, your reflective mind, your spirit.
The folks who reacted negatively in review of this book missed the point or had other expectations. They almost kept me from purchasing The Great Work. I'm glad I bought it. It's one of the two or three most important works I've read.

Thoreau. Muir. Leopold. Today I am adding Thomas Berry to this list. He will be remembered as the spokesman for our planet as we entered the new millennium. In this book, Berry insightfully writes, "without the soaring birds, the great forests, the sounds and coloration of the insects, the free-flowing streams, the flowering fields, the sight of the clouds by day and the stars at night, we become impoverished in all that makes us human" (p. 20).

"The Great Work" is a collection of 17 deep-ecology essays followed by a comprehensive, 32-page bibliography of "source materials." In his essays (which address, among other things, the environment, economics, politics, and education), Berry encourages us to reflect upon our human role amidst the "wonder" (p. ix) and "magic" (p. 20) of the Earth, "the garden planet of the universe" (p. ix), and move with great effort from our "devastating exploitation" of the planet to a more "benign presence" (p. 7). In one essay, "The Earth Story" (Chapter 3), Berry examines our integral human role on the 4.6-billion-year-old, "radiant blue-white, . . . privileged" planet Earth (pp. 21-22) that hangs in a 14.6-billion-year-old universe. In each essay, Berry encourages us to reexamine our relationship with the Earth--"to dream again"(p. 47), because we are now living in a "moment of grace" (p. 196) as we move into the twenty-first century, which enables us to "be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner" (p. 3). Reading this book could change the way you live your life.

G. Merritt

This may be the great summary work of Thomas Berry. It is historically up to date, as befits a great historian of religion, science and the Earth. The assessment of the present is realistic to any who appreciate what we have lost. He projects into the future from the past as far as can be seen and hoped. That is a very long distance indeed on both ends. The next stage is dependent on human choice to a large extent. The assessment of where we are and what we have done/accomplished is rather grim and realistic from a geophysical standpoint but is hopefull in its projections for Earth going forward, according to Thomas. Thank you, Thomas Berry, for this perhaps last published summary work.

Thomas Berry is one of those rare people who can see beyond existing paradigms and synthesize new and necessary ones. The people who rate this book poorly appear trapped in an earlier paradigm and see the ideas of Berry as "New Age" or "pagan". Remember, Jesus was killed by those who opposed his new paradigm!

The Great Work of our time is re-imagining our primary role as humans NOT in terms of human-human or even human-divine relationships but in human-Earth relationships. Seeing the Divine anywhere requires seeing the Divine everywhere.

This is not just a book about ecological spirituality - that is too limited in scope. Thomas Berry challenges us (humans) to work towards re-inventing ourselves as a sacred manifestation of the Universe.

One of the best books written in the past decade. Highly recommended.

This book starts off slow and builds. It starts out sounding like a sermon, preaching renewed intimacy with the natural world. Of course it is easier to describe that, than to actually suck the reader into that experience. Slowly, however, Berry passes beyond preaching. The book becomes a passionate documentary, exposing with careful accuracy the gaping holes in our ethics, our laws, and our cultures. He travels up and down planetary history and across civilizations, always sounding familiar with his vast element. The whole presentation is an example of what Berry preaches: life centered on the greater self of the living planet, with all things no longer revolving around humanity.

--author of The Gardens of Their Dreams: Desertification and Culture in World History

The 5-star reviews are not wrong in their content, only in their rating. The low reviews are incomplete, probably because the reviewers don't care to expound... I'm guessing there would be several more negative reviews if this book didn't generate such a "-bluh-" feeling in the reader.

I consider myself a pragmatic environmentalist... this book simply had no substance for me, nothing to grab onto. There are almost no anecdotes, just abstract talk about how people should remove themselves from the top rung of the evolutionary chain, and step down to the level of all other species (should dolphins and chimpanzees do the same?). Berry bemoans almost every aspect of organized human life (which implies some psychological issues in the author), but offers no suggested replacements or improvements. Even where he draws on the example of nature, his obvious selectivity makes no effort to find understanding in how humans may have diverged from our natural family. It's just one general, abstract gripe session after another.

And this just goes on and on and on. I'm not a speed-reader, but after the first half, I found myself able to read a page every 7-8 seconds. It just looks the same, reads the same... check this book out from the library first, and see if you agree.

If you want hope, if you want -tools-, if you want ideas, if you want a notion of how life could look, not just a summary of how it -shouldn't- look, I might recommend to you Dee Hock's "Birth of the Chaordic Age"... but definitely something other than "The Great Work". And I'm so sorry to have to say that... Thomas Berry seems like a nice, caring person... but he doesn't provide anything beyond (or even approaching) the great authors from the late 19th century.

This book is...different. I got it looking for some ANSWERS on how to help our current Earth situation. It gave me ONE that will work. (A waste management idea. Not one I was WISHING for. Not something I can do.) All others were a little too mumbo-jumbo along the lines of holding hands and looking at the stars together. It does offer reasons why our situation must change but is nothing in comparison to Daniel Quinn's works. Read his instead.

The legitimate concern to respect our planet should not lead us to adore the planet, as the good father argues. Even in a rain forest the Creator is not the creature.

Upper middle-class confusion.

Thomas Berry promotes a "new story" of the universe, also known as the "Earth story," "Universe story," or "new cosmology." The new cosmology essentially is a bio-centric, Godless, New Age, and scientific account of creation, rather than a God-centered religious story. Sadly, Berry is widely promoted as a Catholic author, yet there is nothing Catholic about this book. In fact, the book is generally critical of Christianity and Western Culture. During our time of environmental crisis, we need to turn to God, the Creator of the universe. This book will only steer us away. Save your money. There are better Christian faith and ecology books out there.