What is a miracle?
Photo by Serafima Lazarenko on Unsplash
Photo by Black Iris Visuals on Unsplash
The birth of modernity
Somewhere around the house there is a battered paperback copy of Edith Hamilton’s “The Greek Way,” a concise summary of the Greek contribution to Western civilization that I read as a sophomore in college.
Photo by Ed Robertson on Unsplash
Be mine, Valentine
What’s the story of love?”
Gardens by the Bay, an urban nature park, Singapore • Photo by Daniel Welsh on Unsplash
When is enough enough?
Eighteen years ago, Bill McKibben jolted our environmental awareness with a splendid little book, “The End of Nature,” that cataloged the ways human economic activities are rending the fabric of nature.
Anopheles funestus • Photo by James Gathany, Dr. Frank Collins, University of Notre Dame (Public Domain)
The bite that binds
Humans and mosquitos share an ancestor in deep time. Our kinship is revealed at the level of the genes. Certainly, we are enough alike chemically so that human blood protein is useful to the mosquito.
Photo by Mark de Jong on Unsplash
Celebrating the ineffable
The scientific atheists (Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, for example) and the scientific theists (Francis Collins and Owen Gingerich, for example) hammer away at each other.
Photo by Samuel PASTEUR-FOSSE on Unsplash
Drawing heat from this contagious sun
Regular visitors here will know that the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins frequently intrudes into my thoughts.
Wernher von Braun (center) with other Nazis at Peenemünde • Deutsches Bundesarchiv (CC-BY-SA 3.0)
Where the rockets come down
In July, 1943, rocket scientist Wernher von Braun traveled to Hitler’s military headquarters in East Prussia to brief his Führer on the A4 Wunderwaffe, or wonder weapon.
A portion of the Ultra Deep Field • NASA/ESA (Public Domain)
Billions and billions and billions…
14 billion is the age of the universe in years.
Stonehill College campus • Photo by Jennifer Macaulay (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Mission
This week’s Musing is not addressed to the usual visitors to this site, but to friends and colleagues who are concerned about the mission and identity of Catholic institutions of higher education.