Mary Evelyn Tucker

Mary Evelyn Tucker is affiliated faculty with the Yale Center for Environmental Justice. She is co-director with John Grim of the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology. With Grim she 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. 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 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.

Tucker and Grim have created six online courses 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, Tucker and Grim 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.

Tucker 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 John Grim, she has received numerous awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture.

Find more on her work here.