Living with God in the Material World
As Mary Ann Meyers prepared to head to the Philadelphia airport for her flight to Copenhagen, a rare earthquake rattled the east coast. Days later, her academic symposium over, Meyers had to delay her return as Hurricane Irene buzzsawed its way up the Eastern seaboard.
"The pairing of two violent natural events, with catastrophic potential that could not, by definition, have been prevented by any human foresight or caution, gave me a moment's pause in light of the symposium's theme—God's transformative presence in the material world," Meyers reflected.
The Denmark conference was a three-day interdisciplinary program titled, "Is God Incarnate In All That Is?". Leading theologians, philosophers, and scientists gathered to ponder questions surrounding the foundational Christian idea that God became incarnate as a human being, and what that may entail for the relationship between matter, spirit, and divinity. The John Templeton Foundation's Humble Approach Initiative (HAI), directed by Meyers, sponsored the symposium. Since its inception in 1998, the HAI has sponsored 40 such gatherings on a wide variety of topics in science and spirituality. The program is inspired by the late Sir John Templeton's conviction that, "humility is a gateway to greater understanding and open[s] the doors to progress."
The symposium's theme emerged from a paper the Danish Lutheran theologian Niels Henrik Gregersen wrote about what he calls "deep incarnation"—the idea that God, in some sense, permeates the material universe. It's a concept that Gregersen, who chaired the symposium, contends has radical implications for the way minds, Christian and otherwise, formed by the Western intellectual tradition regard nature.
This concept may have been lost or diminished in the West, but has long been alive in the Christian East says the Very Rev. John Behr, an Orthodox theologian and participant in the HAI event. Behr, dean of New York's St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, says that all Christians once regarded the divine as intimately bound to the material world, though not in the same way as pantheistic religions do. Under the influence of medieval Scholasticism, however, Westerners began to see God as operating outside of his creation.
"We have become so accustomed to an estranged God: God as someone, or something, who set the world going with its natural laws," Behr tells the Templeton Report. "We can only imagine his 'entrance' into creation in a supernatural way. We should look again at how God in fact reveals himself, rather than how we think he needs to reveal himself now that we have effectively banished him."
If God relates to the material world in an ontologically more intimate sense, what does evolutionary biology tell us about his nature, given the prospect that, in the words of Catholic theologian and symposium participant Elizabeth Johnson, "the divine reach (extends) into the very tissue of biological existence"? From a non-theistic point of view, is it possible that, as the scientist Stuart Kauffman proposed at the conference, discoveries in quantum mechanics and evolutionary biology point the way to a way of resacralizing the world without God?
Said Meyers: "As the conversation progressed, people were seeing new ways—and not necessarily all agreeing—on their understanding of the Incarnation as something more than a one-time historical event." For his part, Behr reports that even months after the conference, he's still contemplating the insights scientists presented at the symposium, and trying to incorporate them into his theological thinking. Papers given at the event are now being revised in light of the subsequent discussion, and, as with past HAI symposia, will likely be published as a collection.
"Sir John had a passionate interest in exploring the depths of God's hiddenness," Meyers said. "I think the discussion in Denmark helped illuminate that ever-absorbing concept. I see in Sir John's writing a strong indication that he believed the universe is striving towards the fulfillment of God's purposes. The disharmonies we see in the natural world, and in human nature, may be setbacks, but Sir John's view was that even so, they can give us a glimpse of the true nature of reality, if we are humble enough to listen to the rumbling of the earth and learn what the winds may have to teach us."
Healing Body and Soul
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You don't have to be intensely religious to have spiritual concerns when you're sick. In a December 6 health column, the Wall Street Journal's Laura Landro reported studies showing that up to 40 percent of seriously ill patients admit to struggling with spiritual questions and issues. Moreover, health research has shown that patients who maintain a positive attitude throughout their illness are more likely to recover than those who do not—even if patients initially said they didn't want to have a spiritual discussion as part of their treatment.
That's why cutting-edge approaches to medical treatment are beginning to integrate care for the soul into the healing process through health care chaplaincies, Landro writes. Yet more studies need to be done to identify best practices for the emerging field.
"Every dimension of health care has to be accountable," Walter Smith, a Jesuit priest and president of the nonprofit Health Care Chaplaincy in New York, told the Journal. "Creating a strong research foundation of what chaplains do in the clinical setting will mark the coming of age of health-care chaplaincy as a profession."
To this end, a new $3 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation enables the Health Care Chaplaincy to oversee six national research projects examining the role of health care chaplains.
Additionally, the George Washington University's Institute for Spirituality and Health (GWish), which the Foundation has supported with grant funding, is overseeing the National Spiritual Care Demonstration Project. GWish head Christina Puchalski tells the Journal's Health Blog that teaching doctors and nurses to be sensitive to patients' spiritual needs helps uncover "critical information required for effective diagnosis and treatment."
Humankind's Star-Crossed Destiny
In time for holiday gift-giving, Taylor & Francis publishers has just released The Astronomy Revolution: 400 Years of Exploring the Cosmos, an extensively illustrated, comprehensive volume exploring intellectual and cultural advances since the invention of the telescope. The book not only considers the purely scientific aspects of astronomical and cosmological discovery, but also the impact the telescope has had on Eastern and Western culture. What's more, essayists address the big philosophical questions emerging from humankind's quest for knowledge in the heavens.
The Astronomy Revolution was inspired by the landmark 2008 New Vision 400 conference in Beijing, which celebrated four centuries of the telescope. As the Templeton Report noted at the time, the mammoth interdisciplinary scholarly meeting was the Foundation's first major initiative in China.
