essay
In 1996, the year before he became prime minister, Tony Blair published a collection of his speeches and articles under the title New Britain: My Vision of a Young Country. In that book Blair inserts the history of Britain within the larger context of the history of Christianity and very much in the tradition of…
Postmodernism has infected technical physics also in subtle ways. Recall that the central theme of postmodernism is that all knowledge is relative. Most of all, scientific knowledge too has no objective or factual validity. It is just another epic story like so many others. So we have a book by Roger Jones (Physics for the…
“…the place to look for hope is not just to the postcolonial novel—which has struggled to achieve the insights of Ouologuem or Midimbe—but to all-consuming vision of this less-anxious creativity. It matters little who it was made for; what we should learn from is the imagination that produced it. Man with a Bicycle is produced…
Last week I said I envied Obama’s patience in conflict, and this week as promised brings more about what it takes to display that sort of poise. This discussion also keys into two of the main themes that run through my thinking and writing. One is that the foundation of good behavior is built not…
Part I “African art has been maligned in the writings of Western scholars who have failed to understand its source and origin… In private collections, African artworks become transfixed on the mantelpiece in wooden cubicles, bathed in a caressing interplay of lights, but with very little or no reference—suggested or amplified—to their contextual use of…
From the founding of the scientific academies in Europe in the seventeenth century up until the middle of the last quarter of the twentieth century, there was the implicit belief that science, such as had been erected during the last few centuries, had a validity that transcends race and religion, creed and nationality. One of…
What is neurotheology? Neurotheology is a new science that explores how brain and nervous system states might create, correlate with, or inform our understanding of religious experience. With new instrumentation we can explore our bodies and how they respond to various types of religious experience. Exploring the nervous system’s relationship to religious experience helps interdisciplinary…
The problems we face today—economic collapse, environmental degradation, energy needs—are so broad and complex that they seem intractable. Plenty of brain-power is being applied to our situation, and there is no shortage of individuals trained at our blue-chip academic institutions on Wall Street , in the halls of government, and in corporate enterprises. And yet,…
Sure-fire recipes are wonderful things, and the history of civilization can be read as the search for and discovery of such recipes. Unfortunately, it can also be read as a long line of claims to have discovered allegedly sure-fire recipes that turn out to be not so sure-fire after all. Every day we experience the…
The Pope points out that one such modern ideology is liberation theology which in Latin America ended up substituting the Christian idea of redemption. The relation of personal responsibility to sin and redemption was shifted to the relation between social structures and redemption. The approach is now not that of conversion of the heart but…