Journey of the Universe: An Earth Sunday Screening

Join us on Sunday, May 12 at 7:30 pm after Second Sunday Supper for an encore showing of “Journey of the Universe.”

Join us on Sunday, April 28 at 1 pm for a special Earth Sunday screening of Journey of the Universe, a unique odyssey of cosmic, biological, and cultural evolution that offers insight and inspiration for our present ecological challenges. In a single 60-minute narrative, writer and host Brian Swimme guides us through a scientific and spiritual Great Story, from the birth of the universe to the emergence of complex structures, from the dawn of life as we know it to the conscious present moment. The whole experience is framed by a single day on the Greek island of Samos, a crossroads of history and discovery.

Different from purely scientific approaches, Journey is the first film to integrate arts and humanities into the cosmic big picture. Drawing on the work of the late Fr. Thomas Berry, a cosmologist, historian, and eco-theologian, Journey won an Emmy Award for Best Documentary in 2012 and has birthed an online video series and podcast, as well as a sequence of online courses through the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology.

Learn more and see the trailer at the official website: https://www.journeyoftheuniverse.org/

(This event is sponsored by AAHS.)

More information from the filmmakers:

Journey of the Universe narrates the 14 billion−year story of the universe’s development, from the great flaring forth at the universe’s inception to the emergence of simple molecules and atoms to the evolution of galaxies, stars, solar systems, and planetary life of greater complexity and consciousness. This is a story that inspires wonder as we begin to understand such complexity through science and appreciate such beauty through poetry, art, history, philosophy, and religion. It also awakens us to the dynamic processes of evolution that are chaotic and destructive, as well as creative and life-generating.

Journey of the Universe is a cosmology, although not just in the scientific sense of the study of the early universe. Rather, it is a cosmology in the sense of being an integrated story that explains where both humans and life forms have come from. All cultures have had such stories. We now have the capacity to tell a comprehensive story drawing on astronomy and physics to explain the emergence of galaxies and stars, geology and chemistry to understand the formation of Earth, biology and botany to envision life’s evolution, and anthropology and the humanities to trace the rise of humans. Journey draws on all these disciplines to narrate a story of universe, Earth, and human evolution that is widely accessible.

Journey weaves science and humanities in a new way that allows for a comprehensive sense of mystery and awe to arise. Such an approach expands the human perspective beyond an anthropocentric worldview to one that values life’s complexity and sees the role of humans as critical to the further flourishing of the Earth community.