Baptized William Nathan Berry, Jr., and known to many of us as Brother, Passionist priest and widely acclaimed cultural historian Thomas Berry died in Well-Spring Retirement Community, Greensboro NC, at 6:25 am, Monday, June 1, 2009.

Read more about Thomas Berry in the New York Times, Dot Earth Blog article: Dot Earth: The Great Worker.

Interview with Thomas Berry from the book, “What Does God Look Like in an Expanding Universe?” edited by Jim Schenck

Nothing Changes When We Die
Thomas Berry

What happens when we die? It must be a pretty intimate question for you at
this point at eighty-seven.

Berry: In a certain sense. For me it gets less and less a part of my
thinking. It’s a case that nothing changes in a sense when we die. We enter
a new place of our existence that is beyond description. It’s a deeper mode
of participation in what you call the great celebration of existence. But
its greatness is in its specifics. We have a feeling, in a sense, of how to
approach it, how to deal with it. But how to describe it - it doesn’t easily
permit itself to be described in a technical way, it’s a mythic likeness
that we understand.

Do you think individuality still exists after death?

Berry: Yes. Christianity has a clearer perception of that, I think, than
other traditions. The idea of the uniqueness of individuals comes from our
efforts to understand the person in Christ. There’s a saying in the earlier
tradition that the individual is beyond, is inevitable. The individual is
beyond analysis because he belongs to that unique something which isolates a
person into being an individual, of having a unique identity. The individual
is unique, irreplaceable, it cannot be replaced, it cannot be confused with
anything else. It doesn’t go into anything else. Because there is certain
negative aspect of individual, something like genetic coding. The genetic
coding is what cuts off the species from other species. And that’s why the
species is fertile among their components, but does not reproduce with any
other species. The individual person has unique values. That is, in some
ways, the great contribution of Christianity. That’s why the basic belief in
Christianity is not in Jesus exactly. We were not baptized in the name of
Jesus. We were baptized in the name of the Trinity. So the Trinity is the
basic Christian doctrine and Christ becomes the human manifestation of the
second person which is identified as the Word of the Intelligent Being of
the Divine. So the idea of a transcendent personal deity created the
universe distinct from, not separate from, but distinct from itself is the
basic context in which Christianity comes and why there is a certain balance
of earth-oriented religions. But that’s what gets us into trouble because we
begin to fail to appreciate that the universe is not an extrinsic creation.
It’s a manifestation of the Divine, but the Divine is not distinct from but
intimately present in creation.

So when we die, if we’re talking about a persona of death, our persona
remains.

Berry: That is the basic Christian belief. A very distinct, powerful
Christian belief, that the individual survives as an individual. Because we
are unique beings we need theresurrection of the body so that in Christian
belief, the resurrection of the body is demanded by the belief in the
integrity of the individual person. I think St. Thomas says, we are not a
complete person until the resurrection of the body. We have a great demand
for body. What a resurrected body would be, is anyone’s guess.

In terms of our present view of the universe being twelve-billion light
years across, where would this body be?

Berry: If the material of one body is transformed into the material of
another body where would that body be - Reincarnation. My guess is you will
find the answer to this question a challenge.