at the Field Museum the year before. Philosophy Thomas Berry introduced Swimme to the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Swimme is deeply influenced by Teilhard's ideas. Swimme described his discovery of Teilhard in his foreword to Sarah Appleton Weber's translation of Teilhard's The Human Phenomenon: He adopted Teilhard's thinking that everything in existence has a physical as well as a spiritual dimension. He believes the universe is a deep transfiguration process. Love, truth, compassion and zest—all of these qualities regarded as divine become embodied in the universe. In this way, the universe is imagined as evolving with a telos of beauty. Suzanne Taylor, founder of Mighty Companions, said Swimme is a charismatic person who seeks to place scientific technology in its context of the infancy of the earth community as it struggles for reconnection to its sacred source. She believes that he sweeps us into the grand picture of human beings as the current culmination of the still-evolving universe. Swimme tells the story of the evolution of the universe and attempts to pull people into a universe of meaning, where there is not only connectivity, but directionality as well. In Canticle to the Cosmos, Swimme says: "If you look at the disasters happening on our planet, it's because the cosmos is not understood as sacred ... a way out of our difficulty is a journey into the universe as sacred." Harvard astrophysicist Eric Chaisson wrote that Swimme, a mathematician by training, seeks a larger, warmer, more noble science story, stating that, not merely a collection of facts, science should be a student's guide to a grand world-view, including, if possible, meaning, purpose and value; he sees the cosmological perspective as one to which all modern scientists can objectively subscribe, yet the meaning and purpose of it being a subjective outgrowth of an individual's reflection upon that cosmology ... In a 2007 interview with Robert Wright, Swimme said ... if you take Buddhism and Christianity and so forth there's a kind of battle — a subtle sort of struggle taking place because they're not standing in a common ground but ... take the Earth or ecology then suddenly they can begin to explore what they have to offer. So I do think absolutely that ... there will be a flourishing of religions, not a withering away. And they will flourish to the degree that they will move into the context