Produced by Yale faculty member
s Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, this film received an
Emmy® Award for Best Documentary from the Northern California Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts; Sciences in San Francisco, June 9, 2012. Created and written by Tucker and evolutionary philosopher Brian Thomas Swimme, the one hour documentary is an epic story of cosmic, Earth, and human transformation.
Brian Swimme as narrator invites viewers to become fellow travelers on an exploration of the origins of the cosmos, the emergence of life, and the rise of humans. Filmed on location on the Greek island of Samos, the birthplace of the philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras, the documentary “weaves together the findings of modern science with enduring wisdom found in the cultural traditions of the West, China, Africa, India, and indigenous peoples to explore cosmic evolution as a wondrous process based on creativity, connection, and interdependence,” say the producers.
If one had to condense Brian Swimme’s message to a few main thoughts, it would be for humans to be willing to walk their hearts back to the beginning of the universe, and once there, to begin appreciating the beauty, generosity and love which propelled it into existence. Beauty, generosity, pure generativity and love are his descriptions for the dawn of our 13.7-billion- year journey.
This telling of a new “universe story” does not displace religious understandings of creation. Indeed these can be illumined by modern cosmology. Over the past two millennia Christians have lived with several shifts in the predominate cosmology. In what ways might the present shift in a cosmological world view impact us today?
Sponsored jointly by St. Benedict’s Episcopal Church and Trinity United Methodist Church