Reflections on the future of humankind, and its further social, cultural and spiritual development, feature prominently in the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. His thoughts on these matters can be a splendid resource for our contemporary efforts to move forward in building a more interdependent network of mutual responsibility and care within the global community. He expressed with clarity and forcefulness that we areonehumanity, withoneorigin, andonedestiny. We have not yet reached maturity in terms of our possibilities; our immense problems somehow resemble the turmoils of youth. Teilhard argued that all of humankind should...

Teilhard was in the midst of his Jesuit and scientific studies when, in late December of 1914, he was drafted into the French army. He was given three weeks of training and sent to the front lines of the First World War, as a stretcher-bearer. During the previous fifteen years he had lived in the quiet of a Jesuit community life. Suddenly he was thrown among strangers with different values and into the chaos of trench warfare. In this troubled situation he came to have an intensified sense of God and the human future. This is most evident in an...

Teilard de Chardin did not use the word “globalization” when he wrote about the future of humanity. His vision is neither a utilitarian nor a quietist one, based on renunciation, nor is it full of an exacerbated form of piety. It is centered on a Christic perspective that accompanies evolution from the beginning to the end. From inchoative matter to the noosphere, the Spirit draws all forward. A goal of “amorization” emerges and grows in the heart of matter itself.Amorizationis a word derived from the Latin, which can be understood as an ever-increasing openness to “the other,” in...

The multiple and interconnected human and environmental crises we face are of considerable urgency. As the world becomes warmer, as hurricanes increase, as species become extinct, as air and water pollution spreads, and as resource wars heat up, there is a disturbing sense among many environmentalists and ordinary citizens that the clock is ticking toward major disasters ahead. The looming planetary crisis, in its massive scale and increasing complexity, defies easy solutions. Moreover, the heightened frenzy of the global war on terrorism creates blindness toward the wide-spread terror humans have unleashed on the planet—on its ecosystems on land and...

I first encountered the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin as a divinity student in the classroom of the Christian theologian Daniel Day Williams, at Union Theological Seminary in New York, in the early 1960 s. Williams’ theology drew heavily on the work of a number of evolutionary thinkers and process philosophers, especially Alfred North Whitehead. Like Whitehead, Teilhard did his most creative work in evolutionary philosophy and theology during the 1920s and 1930s. This was a period that produced a number of highly creative evolutionary philosophers, including Henri Bergson in France, Samuel Alexander in England, and John Dewey in...

Globalization and the future of humanity: The second of these terms is Teilhardian; the first is not. Between these two there is an initiative to be brought forth, and the United Nations Organization is at the heart of the system that humanity has made to accomplish this task. It is as a man of this system that I wish to engage in this reflection, but I would like to first share some passages from Teilhard de Chardin that have, I dare say, accompanied me and directed me on my path of maturation. Then I will offer my own understanding of...

The word is recent; the reality is ancient. The use of the wordglobalizationin the sense that we mean it today apparently derives from the definition given by an American economist, Theodore Levitt, in an article published in 1983: multiplication of trade, universal competition, and the extension of great industrial networks.

Before we go further in examining this phenomenon, it is helpful to give it some historical context. Globalization as Teilhard understood it includes not only an evolution of economic life, but also evolution itself: as a universal destination that goes well beyond the limits of our planet. The...

Twentieth-century physics has shown that reality is different from what we had thought. At the foundation of ordinary things, elementary particles are not as real as the things that they form, but they are different in essence. Physical reality is not what it looks like, and it is possible to propose that:

1. The basis of the material world is nonmaterial.

2. Reality has the nature of an indivisible, non-separable wholeness.

3. Quantum entities possess properties of consciousness in a rudimentary way.

These aspects of physical reality provide an important framework for the vision of Teilhard de Chardin, which had...

For the past century, knowledge has been classified for the most part along Western lines in China. Thus, notions of science (kexue), philosophy (zhengzhi), and religion (zongjiao), were neologisms introduced in China at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. The introduction of these concepts (and here we especially concern ourselves with those of science and philosophy) oriented modern Chinese thought toward new debates that the Chinese had never experienced in the past. As modern Chinese thought derived its epistemology from the West, it should, by the same means, take in the different fields of inquiry...