Pope Francis has had a lot to say about technology in recent times, most notably in Laudato Si’. In that regard he is no different from popes over the last two hundred years who, like many of their contemporaries, have noticed the effects of successive industrial revolutions and eventually said something about
The Isolation of Suffering Those enrolled in the School of Suffering often feel as though the school has but one student: having no classmates forced to share in their experience, they are utterly alone. The professor, Suffering, is both irresistibly present, but paradoxically manages to be simultaneously distant and abstruse.
If modernity fancies itself the enlightened heir to a benighted past, Peter Harrison, thanks to his Some New World, is the genealogist who uncovers the family secrets. Earlier, we saw how Harrison dismantles the secular mythos of “progress” and “belief,” exposing their theological scaffolding. Now, he trains his sights on
One of the episodes that strikes me most from the life of Rose Busingye is what happened to her when she tried to respond to the need of some Ugandan women who were sick with AIDS. She was a nurse in Kampala and had made attempts to help these women,
It is a natural human instinct to look for the purpose or meaning of things. We ask why we exist, what meaning our lives have, and whether the universe itself has any purpose. And so it is with evolution. Ever since Darwin published the On the Origin of Species in
Philosophical dialectic springs from the impulse to overcome conceptual thinking.—Ludwig Klages, Rhythmen und Runen, 1944 Continental philosophy’s main role in the American academy is to serve as the home for certain kinds of skepticism, particularly those directed toward stable conceptions of knowledge and meaning. Nonspecialists use the words deconstruction and
Peter Harrison, a distinguished historian of science, religion, and ideas, has profoundly shaped contemporary scholarship on the interwoven histories of these domains. His acclaimed works—‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (1990), The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (1998), The Fall of Man and the Foundations
To the modern mind, the idea of a natural “desire of seeing God”—a common expression in the modern age—appears highly problematic. When I first heard the question at the head of this essay, I did not even know what it meant. How could philosophy justify what by modern definition falls