I was reading Rowan Williams and I cam across a line I quite liked, given my insistence with Pannenberg that the criterion of public truth is an essential one for the task of theology, and for the (ultimately) necessary continuity and harmony of scientific and religious thought: "The love of truth drives us from the world to God: and the truth of ( Read more... )

There's a welcome sound of rain falling outside right now, and has been for nearly an hour. The wind even picked up to a more stormy level a few minutes ago. Illinois has been in drought for over a month, the southern part of the state - Ooo! Thunder! - having it even worse, and so this couldn't be more timely. I don't know if this will conjure ( Read more... )

Here's an AP story I noticed just before it vanished off the bottom of the current news lists. I'm not sure who the writer thinks ranks Sir Isaac Newton as an "influential" theologian, but that aside, it's an interesting story. (All theologians I know of find Newton's theology to be much less theologically interesting than his physics.)Israeli ( Read more... )

Here's an article in Slate that caught my eye. This is something that Kevin and I have been talking about as he takes part in developing the revolutionary new set of possibilities in the new data and technologies in neuroscience: the tendency to claim too much for it. I've been thinking about it for the last year, noticing in my teaching how in ( Read more... )

I received a short email from my friend Kevin, who has a Ph.D. in Psychology, about a conversation he had with a friend of ours about astrology. Since I wrote out a longer response to this pretty general question, I thought I'd toss it into the Theological Notebook here as well.

-----Original Message-----[We were out with X at Y Restaurant] and ( Read more... )

You know, I grew up a big fan of Star Trek, loving the "future history" of that sort of science fiction, imagining the continuation of the human adventure beyond what I could study in history or observe and be part of during my lifetime. I've lived to see some of those dreams of the future come true, with grade school kids running around now with ( Read more... )

The temptation of "relevance," which today in academia, I'm afraid, is becoming more and more equivalent to "money making" and corporate ties, is addressed interestingly in this column from The New York Times by philosopher Justine E. H. Smith, particularly with regards to today's much-misunderstood discipline of philosophy. If the history of ( Read more... )

Had a kind of hysterically awesome conversation with Meghan on the front porch about good and bad cholesterols. I really had no idea what cholesterol's function in the body was, other than to apparently supply heart attack patients for medical dramas. It's slightly awesome to have medical students living in the house and to hear them spout ( Read more... )

April 12th: I just looked at the calendar and realized that today's the 50th anniversary of manned space flight, from Yuri Gagarin's single, solo orbit around the Earth. The Americans made much of him being "just a passenger," and that the following month Alan B. Sheppard, Jr. actually did stuff during his 15-minute sub-orbital lob off the Florida ( Read more... )

Some random bits of life, typed over the last day or two: I had a grand conversation late Sunday night with Dan over Skype, and we talked into the earlier hours of the Feast of my faves Perpetua and Felicitas (and Saturnus and the rest, who never got so much credit). He brought me up-to-date on a wise trimming-down of his dissertation, with Ralph ( Read more... )