The way Sister Gail Worcelo talks about it, sisters are almost like first-responders. “Religious communities come into existence because of a cultural or political or historical urgency,” she says. “Sisters have addressed urgencies for education, or for a reconstitution of a life of prayer. And in our time, we see the urgency—the urgency is planetary.” In 2005, Worcelo and Sister Bernadette Bostwick founded the Green Mountain Monastery, a wood-heated farmhouse and unheated yurt on 160 acres of balsam forest in northern Vermont. They were joined by Sister Amie Hendani, from Jakarta, last year. The women give retreats (upcoming: Monastic School of Collective Emergence), grow their own vegetables and travel to lecture on the way in which the Catholic tradition is moving into its planetary, or cosmological, phase.

This last part, and the inspiration for the Green Mountain Monastery (as well as for Genesis Farm, and, in one way or another, for the dozens of female-led spirituality farms and eco-justice centers across the country and on every continent) came, perhaps ironically, from a man. His name was Thomas Berry, and he was a Passionist priest, cultural historian, and self-proclaimed “geologian,” a historian of the earth. Worcelo and Bostwick first met him in 1984, when he came to lecture at St. Gabriel’s Monastery in Pennsylvania, where they were novitiates. He told the community that it was time to respond to the planetary crisis, Worcelo recalls, and begin to think of humanity as intricately connected to the natural world. “We go into the future as a single, sacred community,” he said, “or we’ll perish on the way.”

His message was unlike any other circulating in the Church at that time, and predated much of the secular, scientific writing that would later ignite the climate movement. For the next 25 years, until his death in 2009 (he is buried at the Green Mountain Monastery), Berry expanded upon his thesis, writing, most notably, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future. In it, he distills a sweeping survey of religious, economic and cultural history into a call for change. Berry himself was inspired by a predecessor: the Jesuit Priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who wrote, in 1901, “The true summons of the cosmos is a call consciously to share in the great work that goes on within it; it is not by drifting down the current of things that we shall be united with their one, single soul, but by fighting our way, with them, toward some goal still to come.”

Though Berry’s works are grounded in a sense of the sacred, they’re also deeply scientific, and a far cry from the Holy Scriptures—none so far as The Universe Story, which Berry wrote with the physicist Brian Swimme in 1992. The book charts the 15-billion-year history of the mysteriously perfect chain of events that led from the “Primordial Flaring Forth” (i.e. the Big Bang) to the Great Adventure (i.e. evolution) of life on earth to the development of human consciousness and cultures. The Church also recognizes this history; it condones theistic evolution, or evolutionary creationism, which holds that theology and modern science are not incompatible. And yet The Universe Story is striking because while it considers the historical impacts of Christianity, there is no Christian God involved in its account of creation. The book closes with an explanation of our newest geologic era, the Ecozoic Era, which requires a “mutually enhancing human presence upon the Earth.” Shaped by science, reverence, and a sense of urgency, The Universe Story reads like a cross between Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond and Al Gore. It’s also mind-muddling to the last sentence: “When the curvature of the universe, the curvature of the Earth, and the curvature of the human are once more in their proper relation, then Earth will have arrived at the celebratory experience that is the fulfillment of earthy existence.”