‘Galileo, the Church and Heliocentricity: A Rough Guide’

The Renaissance Mathematicus has posted an excellent ‘Rough Guide‘ to a particular aspect of the Galileo affair. A couple of days ago on Twitter, Brian Cox asked the Twitter historians, “Did Galileo know that he would annoy the Church when he published The Starry Messenger?” The very simple answer to this question is, no but a lengthy …

Review for Religious

  ‘Review for Religious’, which ceased publication in January 2012, was (amongst other things) an important forum for articles and other materials exploring a renewal in the practice and understanding of the Spiritual Exercises and of spiritual direction. The good news is that the full archive of contents is available online for free. Despite the …

Laws of Nature

I recently read an interesting article (Intelligent Design: Humans, Cockroaches, and the Laws of Physics) from 1997 by Victor J. Stenger in which he combats the kind of fine-tuning arguments that are often evinced as ‘proof’ that our universe is carefully set up for the emergence of complex life forms like ourselves. What caught my …

Praying through Film, Story, Song, Art

(I wrote this a few years back for the Loyola Hall website. It’s a way of praying and an attitude towards experience.) If you want God to speak to you you need to give God a vocabulary. Scripture is, of course, a privileged source of ‘words’ that God might address to you — hence the …

ME/CFS: Problems with the Brain’s Immune System?

Two interesting posts at Phoenix Rising explore new research suggesting that ‘messed up microglia could be driving symptoms’. Your dog can’t tell you when she’s feeling sick, but even so, you know. She moves slowly, she doesn’t eat, she sleeps a lot, she curls up in a corner by herself. “Sickness behavior” is shared by …