John Grim

John Grim is affiliated faculty with the Yale Center for Environmental Justice. He is co-director with Mary Evelyn Tucker of the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology. With Tucker he organized 10 conferences on World Religions and Ecology at Harvard that explored the ecological and justice dimensions of the world’s religions. 

They were series editors for the 10 resulting volumes from Harvard. His research area is Native American religions and he edited Indigenous Traditions and Ecology. He also wrote The Shaman: Patterns of Religious Healing.

He has authored with Tucker, Ecology and Religion (Island Press, 2014). They co-edited the Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology (2017) with Willis Jenkins. They are editors for the series on Ecology and Justice from Orbis Books. This includes Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor by liberation theologian, Leonardo Boff. This was a major influence on the eco-justice encyclical letter of Pope Francis, Laudato Si.

Grim and Tucker have created six online Yale/Coursera classes in Religions 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 The Great Work (Random House, 1999) and Selected Writings (Orbis 2014). They published Thomas Berry: A Biography (Columbia University Press, 2019) with Andrew Angyal. 

With Brian Thomas Swimme, Grim and Tucker 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 free online courses from Yale/Coursera.

He has received numerous awards with Tucker, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture. He received an honorary degree from his alma mater, St. John’s University in Minnesota.

Find more on his work see.