Gormless, uncouth, inept and ruthless… we’ve lost their kinder, gentler opposites gormful, couth, ept, … and ruthful – full of ruth. What does ruth mean? You have to make a leap from ‘ruthless’ somewhere into the territory of care and concern. Ruth is that piercing sorrow you feel when you can’t dodge someone else’s distress. …
Yearly Archives: 2005
E=mc2
Nova has a great page of essays and articles to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s amazing year of discovery. The page of podcasts got me thinking. Here are ten top physicists given the brief to describe Einstein’s equation to curious non-physicists–and in under a minute or so! The results are fascinating. What I’ve been …
Turning Back The Clock
My ISP has invented a time machine … or at least this morning when I checked this page it was as if the last week had never happened. I’m awaiting the explanation but have in the meantime done my best to recreate the lost posts. Here they are (more or less) but what is missing …
“The Long Slow Victory of Gnostic over Catholic Christianity”
There’s a fascinating interview with John Dominic Crossan about his new book In Search of Paul over at the Journal of Philosophy and Scripture (via Michael Pahl at the stuff of earth). The section that caught my attention has Crossan commenting on the direction Christianity has taken since the early 20th Century into an apolitical …
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Intruding on a Sacrament
This morning’s Guardian gave me plenty to think about: Justin Cartwright writes about the meaning of life or, rather, its meaninglessness. Religious belief he sees as somewhere between pathetic and pernicious. What strikes me? I think its the tone of the piece: it sounds like its pointing out the obvious to those who should know …
Thursday Week 19 Year I
Indiana Jones is the key. You’ll know all about the Ark of the Covenant if you’re a fan of Indy. And you’ll have a clue why the Israelites are carrying it around today. Not just a box with stones in, the Ark is the Hebrew nuclear power plant – altogether dangerous and altogether amazing. It’ll …
Blessing the Bomb
A day late but still relevant: a speech by Fr. George Zabelka, a Catholic chaplain with the U.S. Air Force, who served as a priest for the airmen who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, and gave them his blessing. He died in 1992 but spoke movingly on the 40th …
Evolution and Theology
Evolution has surprisingly become the focus of debate in Roman Catholic circles after Cardinal Christoph Schönborn produced a critical editorial in the New York Times last month. Today’s Tablet contains a response by George Coyne, SJ, head of the Vatican Observatory. The Independent picked up the story.
Inequality Kills
There was an interesting book review in last weekend’s Guardian about the greater toxic effect of social inequality rather than poverty per se.
Tuesday Week 18 Year I
Be afraid! Be very afraid! Who needs a police state when you’ve got Miriam’s God eavesdropping on your grumbling, ready with a punishment swift and terrible? Not exactly good news as we begin a retreat. Get too close to God, it suggests, and be afraid. Jesus reverses that equation. Out in the sea the disciples …