Forum for Contemplative Ecology Discussion Series

Evan Pritchard, a descendant of the Mi'kmaq people (part of the Algonquin nation), is the founder of The Center for Algonquin Culture. He is Professor of Native American history at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York, where he also teaches ethics and philosophy. Named Abachbahamedtch (or chipmunk) by Micmac people, he is assistant to several Algonquin elders. Since 1990, his work bringing the Algonquin message to the media has helped thousands of people gain a better understanding of this great civilization and its teachings. He lectures frequently around the United States, sharing storytelling, traditional and contemporary songs, and bi-lingual poetry. He was the organizer of the North American Friendship Circle gathering on Columbus Day, 1992. He is also the founder of the Red Willow Society, Resonance Communications, and Roads To Awareness Seminars. Pritchard has given “Native New Yorker” walking tours of lower Manhattan for the Smithsonian Institute, The Open Center, South Street Seaport, and other institutions.

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).

National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C, the Smithsonian Institution, the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and other museums around the world. Her works reside in many private collections throughout the Americas, the Middle East, Europe, and Southeast Asia and in distinguished public collections including NASA and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air & Space Museum. In 1988, Manno was commissioned by NASA to commemorate the U.S. return to space flight with the launch of Discovery, the first after the Challenger accident. She is the only female visual artist selected for this honor. Other artists to capture the novelty of space travel for the space agency include Norman Rockwell, Robert Rauschenberg, and James Wyeth. Her artwork for this assignment has toured throughout the United States and is part of the permanent NASA space art collection at the Kennedy Space Center. Manno’s major solo exhibition, Conscious Evolution: The World At One, toured internationally and was seen by more than a quarter of a million people. With the support of private and corporate sponsors—including actor Tom Hanks, AXA Space, and Prince Sultan bin Salman bin Abdul-Aziz of Saudi Arabia—the artwork featured in the exhibition became part of the permanent fine art collection of the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum. In May 2022, Manno was commissioned by the Vatican Dicastery on Integral Human Development to create an audio-visual program to open Laudato Si’ Week 2022, the seven-year anniversary of Pope Francis’ groundbreaking encyclical. The program, Responding to the Cry of the Earth, featured images from her series Contemporary Icons of Endangered Species and appeared on computer screens around the world as part of the global event No More Biodiversity Collapse: Rebalancing Social Systems with Nature. Manno’s artwork has been noted in numerous publications, including  NPR, Hyperallergic, National Wildlife Magazine, The National Catholic Reporter, The Progressive, Sojourners, ART News, Treehugger, Smithsonian Online Magazine, Kosmos and a nine-page spread in The Artful Mind, the premier art magazine of the Berkshires. Her plein air landscapes are featured in the French documentary film Voyage au Pays des Lavandes (Journey to Lavender Country). Her art is also featured in two coffee table books, Visions of Space and In the Stream of Stars: The Soviet American Space Art Book, and on the cover of the forthcoming volume, Animal Dignity. Manno’s current series,  Contemporary Icons of Threatened and Endangered Species, applies her iconographic training to a contemporary exploration of the environmental crisis and biodiversity collapse.

Diarmuid O'Murchu, a member of the Sacred Heart Missionary Order, and a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin Ireland, is a social psychologist whose early working life had been in social ministry, predominantly in London, UK. In more recent years he has worked as a workshop leader and group facilitator, conducting programmes on Adult Faith Development across several countries. He is a widely read author, with many of his books listed on his webpage. Now as a retired missionary, he lives in Dublin, Ireland.

Victoria Loorz, MDiv, is a “wild church pastor,” an “eco-spiritual director” and co-founder of several transformation-focused organizations focused on the integration of nature and spirituality. She feels most alive when collaborating with Mystery and kindred spirits to create opportunities for people to re-member themselves back into intimate, sacred relationship with the rest of the living world. After twenty years as a pastor of indoor churches, she launched the first Church of the Wild, in Ojai CA and began to meet others with the same sense of call to leave building and expand the Beloved Community beyond our own species. She then co-founded the ecumenical Wild Church Network. Victoria is co-founder and director of Seminary of the Wild, which is focused on a deep-dive yearlong Eco-Ministry Certificate program for all those who feel called by Earth and Spirit to “restore the great conversation” (Thomas Berry). She now calls Bellingham, Washington her home, a beautiful land along the Salish Sea on territory tended and loved for generations by the Coast Salish peoples, in particular the Nooksack and Lummi nations. Victoria's young adult children – Alec and Olivia – are wise, creative, tender souls, dedicated to creating a more inclusive, compassionate, and just world.