Summary of Thomas Berry's The Great Work

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

Book Preview: #1 The Great Work is to lead human thought into spiritual experiences of time and eternity and their mutual presence to each other with a unique subtlety of expression.

The First Americans accomplished this through their ceremonies, such as the Great Thanksgiving ritual of the Iroquois, the sweat lodge and the vision quest of the Plains Indians, and the Chantways of the Navaho.#2 The Great Work now, as we move into a new millennium, is to carry out the transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner.#3 The deepest cause of the present devastation is found in a mode of consciousness that has established a radical discontinuity between the human and other modes of being.

The other-than-human modes of being are seen as having no rights, and they are used by the human.#4 The 19th century was when the sense of need for grandeur in the natural world began.

The conservationists of the 20th century were the beginning of what would become a growing concern for our responsibility to the generations who will live in the 21st century.