No place to call home: on Richard Dawkins’ academy, atheists in church, and the emptiness of scientism
Edward Hopper, Dauphinee House, 1932. It’s good to have a home, physical and otherwise. Image source: Museum Syndicate Back in September, I wrote an article for Religion Dispatches about Richard Dawkins’ refusal to teach atheism — his own view — to kids. Of all the things out there with my name on it, it is [...]
Flannery O’Connor and the end of all things
Barry Moser, Flannery O’Connor (detail). Wood engraving. See the original at moser-pennyroyal.com. Used with permission of the artist The First Sunday of Advent. That was yesterday. And what a Sunday it was. Julie’s sermon was taken from Malachi. Malachi! Can you imagine?! I almost fell over when I saw that. The passage (3.1-3) reads, See, [...]
Sharing evolution: The medium is the message
Ernst Haeckel, Geneological Tree of Humanity, 1891. I love the way science and art meet in this drawing. Of course, the science is no longer much good, apart from the general impression that Homo sapiens is one among many interrelated species (although we get top-center placement). Haeckel’s evocative rendering of the tree makes a subject [...]
Big Head Todd and the mass extinction problem
Todd Park Mohr of Big Head Todd and the Monsters recording at Ardent Studios in Memphis. I missed BHTM back in the 1990′s when they had their major-scale success; I blame graduate school for this. But a good friend introduced them to me several years ago and to this day I am grateful to him [...]
The end of faith? Bring it
And he went away grieving, for he had many possessions. Anonymous, Jesus and the Rich Man, 11th century. Image source: Index of Armenian Art By all appearances, the end is near. That’s what the scientists are telling us, anyway. It seems that a group of specialists in the (really cool) field of nonlinear dynamics have [...]
Silence in the city
Zig, Christina’s World Exit 6. Usually it’s an article or event that inspires posts here at psnt.net, but this time it’s an image. This image, to be precise. The expansive silence of Wyeth’s original is here broken in brilliant fashion by the visual and aural clutter of a heavily traveled freeway. See more of Zig’s [...]
Vatican, ASI to launch new S&R website
B16 in low earth orbit. Image courtesy of Freaking News This just in: The Vatican, along with the Italian Space Agency (ASI), is soon to launch a new science & religion website that will, according to the BBC, be available in Italian and English, [and will have] information on everything from astronomy to theology, from [...]
Why evolution should be taught in church
Aryan Jesus loves himself a little velociraptor. Image source: Monty Propps at b3ta.com This article first appeared at Religion Dispatches These are busy times for those who fight the teaching of creationism in public schools. It’s like playing a giant game of Whack-a-Mole: In January alone, anti-evolution forces first raised their heads in North Carolina. [...]
Why Eckhart matters
A woodcut of Meister Eckhart, provenance unknown. This image is featured on the cover of Bruce Milem’s book, The Unspoken Word: Negative Theology in Meister Eckhart’s German Sermons I’ve been reading a lot of Meister Eckhart lately. He was a Dominican friar, which means he was not a monk but a preacher (if you ever [...]
Is the whole thing in there?
The Tutor, from your friends at The Highpants Resistance. No children were harmed in the making of this video. This may not be the best way to teach the Bible to children. But it’s all in there. And for those who don’t know already, the Good Book gets much more brutal and misogynistic than the [...]
