Issue 85

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…

When Adam saw her, muscle of a new day, when he squatted to smell the musk between her legs, when he leaned down To grasp the wrist of the most familiar creature he’d encountered yet, to pull himself, the mirror image of himself, to her feet; When he took a few steps back to appraise…

In Anselm Kiefer’s Am Anfang A ladder rises like a DNA helix Out of the seething flux, an ocean Of broken glass, shattered light, The bonds just barely linking there, Chiral, as yet un-living, into proto- Membrane, proto-cell, accreting In the sugary stew of their forming, The nucleotides surging tidal As they begin to spiral…

Dismayed by the murder of Pakistani healthcare workers for vaccinating children against polio, I recall the dread that darkened my childhood before Salk proved the power of killed virus to halt infantile paralysis, the summer scourge. I also recall a girl, held upright by braces the rest of her life, one of six to fall…

There is no way we can thank him, other than not to forget him. But we do not trust our resolve, having to look up his name. Even the name of the virus fades from our minds as strange microbes evolve and spread in Guangdong, driving out old fears with new. SARS, a benign sounding…

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…

Once while I was walking, a man called out to me. He was slender, sitting on the grass with a racing bike beside him. He said, Would you believe a year ago I weighed three hundred pounds? I shook my head, and he said, Nobody else will believe me either. His body showed at once…