A beautiful reflection on the work of dying from Larry Zaroff in the New York Times.
Category Archives: Thoughts
‘The Enemy of My Enemies’
Found this at the end of a reflection by Dan Clendenin for the fourth anniversary of 9/11: ‘The German Pastor Martin Niemoeller (1892–1984), who protested Hitler’s anti-semite measures in person to the fuehrer, was eventually arrested, then imprisoned at Sachsenhausen and Dachau (1937–1945). He once confessed, “It took me a long time to learn that …
Nature and Culture, Intelligence and Gender
As if to illustrate my previous post I discovered this via Slashdot: Richard Lynn, the emeritus professor of psychology at Ulster University, argues that men have larger brains and higher IQs than women, to such an extent that they are better suited to “tasks of high complexity”. The professor has caused outrage in the past …
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Cosmology and Cricket (Oh and Evolution Too)
The game of cricket has been a consuming topic in the last few days–not least because one of our visiting retreat givers is a fanatic and another is from the US and rather bemused by it all. We end our midday meal with a brief prayer and today the person leading it began with a …
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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 …
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.