Barbara Marx Hubbard (1929-2019) was a mother of five children, an eminent futurist, visionary, author, and public speaker. A Jewish agnostic, she was the first of four children of Irene Salzman and Louis Marx who founded the Marx Toy Company. She attended the Dalton School in New York City, studied at the L’Ecoles des Sciences Politiques at the Sorbonne in Paris, and received a B.A. cum laude in Political Science from Bryn Mawr College. In 1951 she married Earl Hubbard, an artist whom she’s met in Paris in 1949. They settled in Connecticut to start their family.

Barbara is especially known for articulating her science-based positive vision of the future and her evolutionary interpretation of the New Testament. Engineer-philosopher R. Buckminster Fuller said of Barbara, “She knows more about the future than anyone else on the planet.” She co-founded the World Future Society and was president of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution, which considered humanity on the threshold of a quantum transformation. Her overarching vision was that humanity could address the global mega crisis and affect a graceful rather than painful transition through the integration of science, technology, social engineering and spirituality. Barbara died on April 10, 2019. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin S.J., a significant influence in her life and vision, died on the same day in 1955.