A slim but powerful entry in the long-running debate between science and religion.
A brief work that argues for the synthesis of Christian faith and scientific discovery.
Brun (Creation and Cosmology, 2009) attempts to square the circle of Stephen Jay Gould’s famous “non-overlapping magisteria”: the worlds of religion and science. He does so with intellectual rigor and a surprising amount of success, beginning with some fairly large ideological conceptions: “Any serious discussion between Christian theology and science must accept that nature is free to become itself,” he writes. “This is to say that there is no interference from supernatural entities into the natural creative process.” Modern physics, he observes, has demonstrated that physical laws are the results of the natural process, not the superimposed dictations of a “super-nature.” Brun’s view, which draws on the work of the famous Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, is that nature is the result of God’s Word, but it is also “free to become itself” without interference from supernatural forces, and that human science is also free to explore it. The author may run into trouble with more doctrinaire readers, not only for flatly declaring that all religions are human inventions, but also for exploring beliefs regarding God’s limitations; Panentheism, he says, believes that God is good and encourages good, but “cannot prevent evil from happening.” He also champions the notion of what he calls “syntheses” of the natural and the spiritual world, typified by the human drive to produce classical music or paintings, for example; the author’s side-discussion of the work of painter Wassily Kandinsky is quite engaging. Despite some distracting typos, the book’s arguments are persuasive. Ultimately, it asserts what many others have hopefully asserted before: that religion and scientific inquiry are only enemies when they’re being shortsighted: “Christianity has always adhered to the notion that faith must seek understanding,” Brun writes. “Therefore, Christian faith cannot ignore the understandings gained by science.”
A slim but powerful entry in the long-running debate between science and religion.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Brun Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
