Obituaries (only a few, there are many)
The New York Times Obituary, June 3, 2009, for Thomas can be read at https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/us/04berry.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=ecozoic&st=cse
FogCityJournal.Com tribute: https://www.fogcityjournal.com/wordpress/1306/a-tribute-to-thomas-berry-1914-2009-prophet-of-the-ecozoic-era/
Yes! Magazine A Tribute to Thomas Berry (1914-2009), Scholar, Visionary, Planet Love, by Mary Evelyn Tucker, posted Jun 10, 2009, https://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/columns/tribute-to-thomas-berry
Thomas Berry’s Burial at Green Mountain Monastery in Vermont, a beautiful photo essay is here https://www.greenmountainmonastery.org/tbburial.html#links
Thomas Berry’s Reflections on Death from on article below this one https://www.greenmountainmonastery.org/tbburial.html#refl
“There are very few instances I can think of where people figure that death is the ultimate end, that is, passing into nothingness. There is almost universally a sense that the dead are part of the community, and a most important part.
Chesterton calls it: “The democracy of the total community.” That’s why tradition is a form of democratic participation, not only of the living but also of those who have died. It is one of the most powerful aspects of Christianity: the sense of the total community of those who have died and those who are living. We haven’t yet developed a very good sense of those who are to be born, of the community of the future and that is why we are doing so many criminal acts against those of the future.
To look at death and beyond with explanations in accord with a mechanistic scientific view obviously would not function, but the acceptance of the continued existence of those who have died is, I would say, clearly an acceptable thing. I think it functions as an extended form of the existing order and can be considered as an existent community that functions in a less visible but no less real way.
A person could say they are functioning by memory of the impact, but there is no reason why we should not accept their personal presence.”
(From: Gaia’s Elegant Gnome: Reflections of Thomas Berry on the New Cosmology and Christian Imagination edited by Anne Lonergan and Stephen Dunn)
