A little over a week ago [July 7, 2005], an op-ed essay appeared in The New York Times by Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, archbishop of Vienna, purporting to clarify the position of the Roman Catholic Church on evolution.
Articles with Religion
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An itch for God
More than a century ago the American psychologist William James set out to account for the universality of religious faith in “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” a book that maintains a lively presence on college reading lists.
Teilhard de Chardin • Archives des jésuites de France (CC BY-SA 3.0)
The phenomenon of Teilhard de Chardin
In the beginning, there was not coldness and darkness: There was the fire,” wrote the Jesuit anthropologist Teilhard de Chardin in “The Mass on the World.”
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The future of Catholicism?
So now we wait for a new Supreme Pontiff. John Paul II will be hard to top.
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In praise of the Enlightenment
In an essay “Why Religion,” the poet Czesław Miłosz tells us that he lived at a time when human imagination was dramatically changing. Heaven and Hell disappeared, he says, belief in an afterlife was weakened, and the borderline between humans and animals was blurred by the theory of evolution.
Earthrise from Apollo 16 • NASA (Public Domain)
Faith-based science is not really science
Now that we have been introduced to the idea of faith-based social programs and faith-based public-education (vouchers), surely it is time for the administration in Washington to make its move on faith-based science.
Annie and Charles Darwin
Darwin and his daughter
Perhaps no other scientist has attracted more biographers than Charles Darwin. And deservedly so. No other scientist has had a more profound effect on how we understand ourselves and our place in nature.
“Galileo Facing the Roman Inquisition” by Cristiano Banti (1857)
We wish he had been more heroic
On the evening of January 7, 1610, Galileo Galilei, citizen of Florence and mathematician of the University of Padua, turned his telescope to the planet Jupiter. He saw the planet as a round disk against a background of three tiny stars, all in a row.
“The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople” by Eugène Delacroix (1840)
When religion subverts science
Question: Who said, “Whenever [one] hears [our] religion abused, he should not attempt to defend its tenets, except with his sword, and that he should thrust into the scoundrel’s belly, as far as it will enter”?
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The new cosmology in tragedy’s wake
All human thought and action is guided by a cosmology, a collectively accepted story for where the world came from and how it works.