Our Directors

Mary Evelyn Tucker & John Grim

Co-Founders and Co-Directors of the Yale forum on religion and ecology

 

Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim are affiliated faculty with the Yale Center for Environmental Justice. They co-direct the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology. Mary Evelyn's concern for the growing environmental crisis, especially in Asia, led her to organize with Grim a series of ten conferences on World Religions and Ecology at Harvard (1995-1998). They were series editors for the ten volumes from the conferences. She co-edited Buddhism and Ecology (Harvard, 1997), Confucianism and Ecology (Harvard, 1998), and Hinduism and Ecology (Harvard, 2000). After these conferences she and Grim founded the Forum on Religion and Ecology. They wrote Ecology and Religion (Island Press, 2014) and with Willis Jenkins they edited the Routledge Handbook on Religion and Ecology (2016). They also are series advisors for the Ecology and Justice Series at Orbis Books. They have created six online courses in “Religions and Ecology: Restoring the Earth Community.”

Tucker and Grim studied with Thomas Berry and worked closely with him for 30 years. Tucker edited Berry's books: The Great Work, Evening Thoughts, The Sacred Universe, and with Grim, The Christian Future and the Fate of Earth and Thomas Berry: Selected Writings on the Earth Community. Tucker and Grim also wrote Thomas Berry: A Biography with Andrew Angyal (Columbia 2019). To extend Berry’s work, Tucker created a multi-media project with Brian Thomas Swimme called Journey of the Universe, which includes an Emmy award winning film, a book from Yale (2011), Journey Conversations, and online classes.

John Grim teaches courses in Native American and Indigenous religions and world religions and ecology. He has undertaken field work with the Crow/Apsaalooke people of Montana and Salish people of Washington state. His published works include: The Shaman: Patterns of Religious Healing Among the Ojibway Indians (University of Oklahoma Press, 1983) and, with Mary Evelyn Tucker, a co-edited volume entitled Worldviews and Ecology (Orbis, 1994).He edited Indigenous Traditions and Ecology: The InterBeing of Cosmology and Community (Harvard, 2001) and co-edited the Daedalus volume titled Religion and Ecology: Can the Climate Change? (2001). He is co-founder and co-director of the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology with Mary Evelyn Tucker.

Mary Evelyn Tucker's Press Kit page

John Grim's Press Kit page