The Human Phenomenon

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Summary: A new translation of The Phenomenon of Man
Review: "You hold The Human Phenomenon" in your hands and one way to understand this is to point to your human agency in grabbing the book. But it is just as true to say that you hold this book because the universe has labored for billions of years to reach a point in its complexification where it can now bring forth something new through you. It comes to you with its own ideas for your future, for what is needed now for the universe's unfolding story is not a new galaxy or a new star. What is needed now is a new form of human being. -- From the Foreword by Brian Swimme, author of The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos

This work by the priest, paleontologist and geologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is his book of the Earth, a discovery and an epic journey to open the way out for humanity in a time of world conflict and release the spirit of the Earth. Teilhard guides the reader back in space-time to experience the birth of our planet as it emprisons the human future in its globe and motion, then forward, through the emergence of life, the birth of thought and socialization, and the unique mode of human unfolding as humanity covers the whole planet in an entirely new membrane, the Noosphere. Through a close study of Teilhard's essays, letters, notebooks and retreat notes, his autobiography and key biographical and interpretive studies, poet and scholar Sarah Appleton-Weber aims to represent Teilhard's thought accurately in this translation which is based on a careful comparison of four versions of the French text.