Thomas Berry, CP (November 9, 1914 – June 1, 2009) was a Catholic priest, cultural historian, and scholar of the world's religions, especially Asian traditions.

He was drawn early on to respond to the growing ecological and climate crisis and proposed the need for a "New Story" of evolution in 1978.

[1] Berry believed that humanity, after generations spent in despoiling the planet, is poised to embrace a new role as a vital part of a larger, interdependent Earth community, consisting of a "communion of subjects not a collection of objects".

It requires what he called "the great work"—the title of one of his books—in four institutional realms: the political and legal order; the economic and industrial world; education; and religion.

He assisted in an educational program for the T'boli tribal peoples of South Cotabato, on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines.

In a tribute to Berry, Mary Evelyn Tucker said that his books—The Dream of the Earth (1988 reprinted, 2006), The Universe Story (with Brian Swimme, 1992), and The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (1999)—are "major contributions to discussions on the environment".

[citation needed] A collection of his essays, Evening Thoughts: Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community (2006), was jointly published by Sierra Club Books and the University of California Press.

His work is disseminated and discussed by the Thomas Berry Foundation, the American Teilhard Association, the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, and the Journey of the Universe project.

An online course "The Worldview of Thomas Berry: The Flourishing of the Earth Community"[13] is available through Yale/Coursera and is hosted by Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim of Yale University.

[14] In 2019, Thomas Berry: A Biography was published by Columbia University Press, written by Tucker, Grim, and Andrew Angyal.