The Copernican Revolution elevated the scientist above the stars, planets, and Earth to a position of the highest being in the cosmos. The Myth Like most, if not all religions, science has a creation myth that proclaims a new cosmic situation. The Copernican myth tells how science began and, like all myths, is recited again [...]
To understand the concept of God in Modernity, I first turned to the high point of Christianity in both the East and West. According to patristic tradition, God can be known in two ways. Cataphatic, or rational, knowledge defines God by positive statements; apophatic knowledge is direct experience of God, although such knowledge cannot be [...]
I, like you, was born in the Kali Yuga, the Dark Age of Hindu mythology, when all the great faiths of the world are on the wane. The secular faith in the Nation-State, in grand schemes to institute Paradise on Earth, and in placing transcendent hope in human institutions has been destroyed by history. No [...]
Recently, I went with a group of friends to a concert of American choral music based on black spirituals. At the intermission, my friends and I spoke excitedly about what we experienced. The sole musician amongst us praised the balance of the ensemble and the conductor’s energy. One woman noticed how nervous the lead soprano [...]
Old-World nihilism belongs to a handful of intellectuals persuaded by philosophical arguments that human knowledge, on the whole, is worthless as a reliable guide for living. Consider Heinrich von Kleist, the nineteenth century dramatist and short-story writer, who became intellectually unglued when he read Immanuel Kant’s The Critique of Pure Reason. In a letter to [...]
In January 2011, an intriguing announcement arrived in my email inbox. The upcoming issue of The New Yorker was to contain “Social Animal” by David Brooks, The New York Times columnist and guru of middle-class American life. I could hardly wait to read “how the new sciences of human nature can help make sense of [...]
Despite the advent of relativity, quantum physics, and chaos theory, most scientists, including most physicists, intellectually inhabit the Newtonian Cosmos. In stark contrast to the Aristotelian Cosmos, where plants and animals possess an inner agency that causes them to emulate the Prime Mover, the Newtonian Cosmos is mechanical, where lifeless matter as well as animate [...]
In the Western World, religion is in decline. Early in his pontificate, Benedict XVI lamented the weakening of churches in Europe, Australia, and the United States. He told a meeting of clergy in the Italian Alps, where he vacations, that “the so-called traditional churches look like they are dying.”[1] For many people, spirituality has replaced [...]
One day my fourteen-year-old daughter came home from her part-time job at the Goffstown New Hampshire Public Library and announced at dinner that she had volunteered me to serve as a Library Trustee. Two weeks later, I received a call from Mrs. Woodbury, the Town Clerk. She informed me that I could not run for [...]