Andrew Angyal
Department of English and Environmental Studies
Elon University
Thomas
Berry's Earth
Spirituality Cultural historian Thomas Berry has devoted his career to understanding how Western
religion and culture have been unable to sustain a nurturing relationship between humans and the earth. In his major works-The Dream of the Earth, The Universe Story, and The Great Work-he has traced the Western spiritual estrangement from the earth in the growth of modern technology. Berry calls for a new cosmology that will reunite humans with the creative energy of the universe and overcome our estrangement from the earth. In "The Spirituality of the Earth," Berry envisions the earth as a maternal and nurturing principle that is the source of our existence and our spirituality. Because of our emphasis on redemption rather than creation, Western science and religion have become separate entities and the social impact of religion and ethics has diminished. Berry calls for a new spirituality "grounded more deeply in the numinous dimension of an emergent universe." An authentic new earth spirituality lies in the "Universe story," the emergent story of the unfolding of cosmic creation leading to life on earth. It affirms that "the universe is a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects."
Andrew J. Angyal is a professor of English and Environmental Studies at Elon University, where he has taught for the past twenty-seven years. A deep interest in American natural history writers has led to three critical biographies of Loren Eiseley (1983), Lewis Thomas (1989), and Wendell Berry (1995), and he is currently working on a biography of Thomas Berry. He has been active in developing the Environmental Studies Program at Elon, where he teaches seminars on American Environmental Writers and Environmental Visions. Angyal taught as a Fulbright Professor at Louis Kossuth University in Hungary in 1986, and has subsequently taught in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and China. He was awarded a USIA Samantha Smith Grant for a student exchange with Hungary (1990) and was a Fellow in Eastern European Studies at Appalachian State University (1990-91). He was a member of the NEH Summer Institute on the "Environmental Imagination" at Vassar College in 1997 and has attended many of the past Templeton Foundation advanced faculty seminars. He holds a Ph.D. in English from Duke (1976), a M. A. in Religion from Yale Divinity School (1972), and a B. A. in English from Queens College, CUNY. Along with his teaching, Professor Angyal runs Windy Knoll Farms, a small organic farm in which he raises organic fruits and vegetables, cut flowers, and Southern heritage apples, and has a small vineyard. He is an active member of Carolina Farm Stewardship Association, which includes his farm on their annual spring farm tour.