(no subject)

It's been a kind of surreal day. I've been doing some reading for my reading list and feeling a bit overwhelmed because good God, how is February half gone already and all that. But I am (I think) making decent progress. I definitely need to clean up; the bedroom is messy enough that it's distracting to look around.

Anyway. Trying to wind down so I can get to bed, I've been catching up on some of the RSS feeds I follow, and I found a really interesting article:

Fear of Crime

( Read more... )

many happy returns to Doc B. (and a few thoughts on science and faith)

February 13 is significant for two reasons. Most importantly to me, it is the anniversary of our pandemonium_213's birth. A noteworthy event; may the stars always shine on the hours of our meeting.

February 13 is also Darwin Sunday. My Episcopalean church in Cleveland always brought in a speaker to talk about the relationship of science and theology on the Sunday nearest to Darwin's birthday. Apparently you see it in a lot of Christian churches. And while the closest I come to organized religion these days resembles a house cell or a book club more than what most people think of when they hear the word church (and so I don't know whether anyone's marking the day in my neighborhood), I still take the occasion to think about the nature of science and faith. That's an important topic to me, though I tend to take the opposite angle than pandemonium_213. It's not a coincidence that the name of my blog is the first half of Augustine's famous slogan, fides quaerens intellectum: faith seeking understanding; faith trying to to understand what it knows.

I hope to make a proper-sized post on all this, because as I think about it I think today's spirituality needs a big helping of what science has on order. More on that later this week, maybe. If I can find the time and energy. But in any event, thinking about it all reminded me of one of the first writings by pandemonium_213 that I ever read. Really, she says it better than I think I will be able to even if I do write the full post:

Inane you call equations, view such regiment askance –
The maths that paint what fuels the sun or destroy with Shiva's dance.
But there is beauty in those numbers, just as elf-patterned and fair
As the myth that drives the Moon upon his chariot of air.

I highly recommend the whole poem - it always gives me food for thought.