Thursday, November 18, 2010
Science and Religion
There is a difference between science and religion. Science is about explanation. Religion is about interpretation. Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.
It is important for us to understand the mistake Professor Hawking has made, because the mutual hostility between religion and science is one of the curses of our age, and it is damaging to religion and science in equal measure.
But let us hail a scientific genius. Professor Hawking is one of the truly great minds of our time. Two thousand years ago the rabbis coined a blessing – you can find it in any Jewish prayer book – on seeing a great scientist, regardless of his or her religious beliefs…the right attitude of religion to science is admiration and thankfulness.
The Bible is not proto-science, pseudo-science or myth masquerading as science. It is interested in other questions entirely. Who are we? Why are we here? How then shall we live? It is to answer those questions… that we seek to know the mind of God.
--Lord Sachs reply to Stephen Hawkings in The Times
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
My deepest me is God
So you must overcome the gap to know—and then Someone Else is doing the knowing through you. God is no longer "out there." At this point, it's not like one has a new relationship with God; it's like one has a whole new God! “God himself is my counselor, and at night my innermost being instructs me,” says the Psalmist (16:7).
The mystics are those who are let in on this secret mystery of God's love affair with all souls, and recognize the simultaneous love affair with the individual soul—as if it were the only one God loves. It's absolutely our unique affair, and that sets the whole thing on a different and deeper ground than mere organized religion can ever achieve by itself.
Richard Rohr
Adapted from Following the Mystics
through the Narrow Gate (CD/DVD)
Tuesday, November 09, 2010
Reading for 7 Creation
Baba Dioum, Senegalese conservationist (b. 1937)
Monday, November 01, 2010
Reading for 6 Creation
To preserve this sacred world of our origins from destruction, our great need is for a renewal of the entire Western religious-spiritual tradition in relation to the integral functioning of the biosystems of the planet Earth. We need to move from a spirituality of alienation from the natural world to a spirituality of intimacy with the natural world, from a spirituality of the Divine as revealed in verbal revelation to a spirituality of the Divine as revealed in the visible world about us, from a spirituality concerned with justice simply to humans to a spirituality concerned with justice to all those other components of the great earth community. The destiny of Christianity will be determined to a large extent by its capacity to fulfill these three commitments. --Thomas Berry, Christianity and Ecology
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Gift of Good Land, reading for 5 Creation
--Wendell Berry
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Rain, Thomas Merton
Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen.
From Rain and the Rhinoceros
Monday, October 11, 2010
Reading for 3 Creation
In this evolving universe, God does not dictate the outcome of nature’s activities, but allows the world to become what it is able to become in all of its diversity: one could say that God has a purpose rather than a fixed plan, a goal rather than a blueprint. As the nineteenth-century Anglican minister Charles Kingsley put it, God has made a world that is able to make itself. John Polkinghorne states that God has given the world a free process, just as God has given human beings free choice. Divine Love frees the universe and life to develop as they are able to by using all of their divinely given powers and capacities. The universe, as Augustine of Hippo said in the fourth century, is “God’s love song.” Because God’s Love is poured out within the creation, theologian Denis Edwards asserts that “the Trinitarian God is present to every creature in its being and becoming.” These are but some of the concepts that contemporary theologians are offering to account for God’s relationship to an evolving creation.
--from the Episcopal Church's Catechism of Creation
Sunday Propers
About Me
- Michael Hudson
- Episcopal priest