Worldly wonder: religions enter an ecological phase.

Over the past century, science has begun to weave together the story of a historical cosmos that emerged some 12 billion years ago. The magnitude of this universe story is beginning to dawn on us, as we awaken to a new realization of its vastness and complexity. At the same time, we are becoming conscious of the growing environmental crisis and of the rapid destruction of species and habitat. Just as we become conscious that the Earth took more than four billion years to bring forth this abundance of life, it is dawning on us how quickly we are foreshortening its future.

We need, then, to step back to assimilate what might be called "our cosmological context." As Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme suggest in their book The Universe Story, we are recognizing our participation in this great narrative and our responsibility for enhancing its future flourishing. If science gives us an understanding of the origins and unfolding of the universe, the story of cosmology gives us a sense of our place in the universe. And if we are so radically affecting the Earth by extinguishing other life forms and destroying our own nest, what does this imply about our religious sensibilities or our sense of the sacred? As science is revealing to us the particular intricacy of the web of life, we realize we are unraveling it. As we begin to glimpse how deeply embedded we are in complex ecosystems and dependent on other life forms, we see we are destroying the very basis of our continuity as a species. As the size and scale of the environmental crisis is more widely grasped, we are seeing our own connection to this destruction.

The world's religions are also being called to contribute to a new understanding of the universe story. The challenge for religions is both to rediscover and reinvent our role as citizens of the universe. This requires addressing such cosmological questions as where we have come from and where we are going.

If humans destroy this awesome matrix of mystery, where will we find sources of inspiration pointing us toward the unfathomable vastness of the sacred? Will religions assume a disengaged pose as species go …