About the Session
In “Grounded in Earth’s Story: Mary Evelyn Tucker on Religion, Ecology, and Resistance,” renowned scholar Mary Evelyn Tucker will invite participants into an interreligious exploration of how the story of a living Earth can reshape our moral imagination and public witness. Drawing on her work with the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology and projects like Ecology and Religion and Journey of the Universe, she will trace how diverse spiritual and religious traditions offer resources for ecological ethics, environmental justice, and an emerging ecological civilization.
Rooted in the 2026 Summit theme of Grounded Resistance, this session will reflect on what it means to stand firmly on sacred ground while resisting systems of extraction, racism, and ecological degradation. Through accessible teaching and stories from global religious communities, Tucker will help participants connect their own faith and spiritual practices to concrete action for climate and environmental justice in their local contexts. Attendees will leave with a deeper theological and ethical framework for Grounded Resistance, as well as spiritual and communal practices that can sustain long-haul, multifaith movements for the flourishing of the whole Earth community
About the Speaker
Mary Evelyn Tucker is co-director with John Grim of the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology. They are affiliated faculty with the Yale Center for Environmental Justice at the Yale School of the Environment and taught. They organized 10 conferences on World Religions and Ecology at Harvard and were series editors for the 10 volumes from Harvard.
Her research area is Asian religions and she co-edited Confucianism and Ecology, Buddhism and Ecology, and Hinduism and Ecology. She has authored with Grim, Ecology and Religion (Island Press, 2014). They coedited the Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology (2017) with Willis Jenkins. They are editors for the series on Ecology and Justice from Orbis Books.
They have created six online Coursera classes in Religion and Ecology: Restoring the Earth Community, which include Indigenous religions, Western religions, and Asian religions. They also edited the books of cultural historian, Thomas Berry, including Selected Writings (Orbis 2014). They published Thomas Berry: A Biography (Columbia, 2019) with Andrew Angyal. With Brian Thomas Swimme, they created a multi-media project Journey of the Universe that includes a book (Yale, 2011), an Emmy Award winning film on PBS, a series of podcast Conversations, and three online courses from Yale/Coursera. T
ucker was a member of the Earth Charter Drafting committee and the International Earth Charter Council. She won the Inspiring Yale Teaching Award in 2015 and has been awarded 7 honorary degrees. With Grim, she has received numerous awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture. Tucker and Grim have created a new knowledge commons website called Living Earth Community. They have also been involved for many years in the movement in China toward Ecological Civilization.