“Apologetics, Christian or other, is always a risky enterprise,” the late Stanley L. Jaki once wrote. “Once caught in apologetic zeal, one can, especially if one is a historian, easily overshoot the target.” It was a characteristically shrewd insight, and one that might be applied to certain aspects of Jaki’s own remarkable career.
“From a theoretical point of view, the search for a compromise between reason and religion marks the evolution of Christian thought and nourishes the philosophy of the church fathers, from Saint Augustine to Saint Thomas. Seen from the point of view of a modern scientist, these efforts have a kind of desperate, tragic grandeur. Other… Continue reading Carlo Rovelli on Reason and Faith
He hopes that his book draws enough interest to justify the publicatioin of a second volume, where he could present topics he addressed in the third and fourth Italian volumes, which are currently used in courses at the master’s-degree level.
My review of Sabine Hossenfelder’s new book is up at U.S. Catholic. “Hossenfelder rejects the ‘faith versus science’ dichotomy too often recycled in these books. She makes it clear from the beginning of her own, Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions, that spiritual ideas and traditions can be perfectly compatible with modern physics… Continue reading Sabine Hossenfelder’s Existential Physics
With thanks to the inimitable James Wood in the New Yorker. The books overlap enough to disclose a composite type: an outsider, a youngish Englishwoman of ambiguous ethnicity (“But you are English—or aren’t you?” Marya is asked), curiously unidentifiable by the traditional English markers of accent and education (“She was born in the West Indies… Continue reading The Discovery of Jean Rhys
