More on: faith

Reading from Two Books: Nature, Scripture, and Evolution   In the Middle Ages, philosophers and theologians described nature as a book, a coherent work in which we could glimpse the mind of God. Like scripture, the book of nature bore the divine imprint—the Imago Dei—and the two books were seen as complementary. In the centuries…

Reading from Two Books: Nature, Scripture, and Evolution   In the Middle Ages, philosophers and theologians described nature as a book, a coherent work in which we could glimpse the mind of God. Like scripture, the book of nature bore the divine imprint—the Imago Dei—and the two books were seen as complementary. In the centuries…

Reading from Two Books: Nature, Scripture, and Evolution   In the Middle Ages, philosophers and theologians described nature as a book, a coherent work in which we could glimpse the mind of God. Like scripture, the book of nature bore the divine imprint—the Imago Dei—and the two books were seen as complementary. In the centuries…

Jeremy Begbie is the inaugural holder of the Thomas A. Langford Research Professorship in Theology at Duke Divinity School and founding director of Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts. He teaches systematic theology and specializes in the interface between theology and the arts. With his PhD from the University of Aberdeen, Begbie has taught…

Ecologies of Knowing: What Natalie Settles Learned in the Lab   IN 2011, NATALIE SETTLES sat down for coffee and a conversation with Stephen Tonsor, head of an evolutionary plant genetics lab at the University of Pittsburgh. Settles had recently moved to Pittsburgh after a decade in Madison, Wisconsin, where she had been fascinated with and…

After Psalm 139 If humans are ninety percent bacteria, then “I”—a consortium—pray for help in keeping me all together. My microbiome is such a swarm of bits and pieces that statistical analyses can’t prove I am. Replete with coding errors and mutations, I am fearfully and wonderfully provisional. Mitochondria, packing their own genome, reside in…

I’ve made plans to keep a private heart, a heart for God, I’ve made plans to pray, and each time I’ve planned poorly—no time, no time, no spirit— and my private heart has been revealed and it has been embarrassing, like when my daughter found my little vibrator—pink and smooth and fun with one bright…

The black cat is always scratching behind his ears, always slinking off to piss in some hidden corner of the guest room. It is both unkind and self-congratulatory of me to feel sympathy for people who don’t possess a sense of humor. Where the hell do I get off, anyway? Admitting something hardly ever makes…

One by one leaves spindle in the wind, the clock runs down, the cricket’s chirr continues. Each year I try to catch the moment the chirring ceases and silence takes on its winter timbre. Each year I miss. Doing nothing, poised for a flash from the Absolute, awaiting rest from unrest, I’m blessed by uncertainty,…

Stars and the sun are not eternal. They flare. They wither. The earth and its high mountains, its tors and spires, aspen groves, scarred and broken bristlecone pines, torrential blizzards, are not eternal.                                            Rivers and seas change courses, alter shores, appear, dwindle, vanish. The rampant floras, birds, reptiles, and mammals of tropical forests…