Author: Karl E. Johnson

John Stott is an Anglican clergyman, author of many books on Christian discipleship, and one of the most influential Christians in the world. E.O. Wilson is a Harvard biologist, author of many books on sociobiology, and one of the foremost advocates of “scientific humanism” in the world. What do they have in common? By the grace of God, they share a common love for the world that God has made, as evidenced by their mutual respect and endorsement of the work of Peter Harris.

Harris is Founder and President of A Rocha, an international Christian conservation organization that has been described as a cross between L’Abri and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The story of the founding of A Rocha is told in Harris’s book Under the Bright Wings (Regent College, 1993).

Strangely enough, Christians are sometimes regarded as enemies rather than friends of the natural environment. Renowned conservation biologist David Orr, for example, recently argued that Christians’ apocalyptic eschatology makes them poor stewards of the earth. This is a new twist on the old idea that some people are so heavenly minded as to be no earthly good. Wilson, in his book The Creation (Norton, 2006), makes a similar assumption.

This idea that Christians are poor stewards of creation traces largely an influential 1967 article by historian Lynn White. But according to a recent and definitive review of the literature by Cornell graduate Greg Hitzhusen ’92, PhD ’06, those who find this narrative appealing should not therefore assume it’s true. Environmental destruction, Hitzhusen argues, has been just as evident in Eastern and non-Judeo-Christian lands. “This is not to deny that some Christians hold anti-environmental views; but the claim that Christians do so in significant numbers and primarily because of their religious beliefs is baseless. Simply put, the spectre of biblical anti-environmentalism is largely a myth.”

Although defending Christianity from baseless criticisms matters, what I love about Harris’s work is that he lives it. He is primarily a practitioner. He is as comfortable banding migratory birds and preserving wetlands as he is discussing theology. Harris named the ministry A Rocha because “it seemed to do justice to all that we were planning–the beginning of field studies, geology, and the only sure foundation for the whole of life, the Rock who is Christ.”

John Stott, in his introduction to Under the Bright Wings, describes Harris as a model of integrated Christian discipleship. In contrast to the “disastrous dualisms” of sacred and secular, spiritual and material, soul and body, Harris understands that “the living God of the Bible is the God of both creation and redemption, and is concerned for the totality of our well-being.” Science and theology are the study, respectively, of God’s two books–nature and Scripture. Christian mission thus “embraces everything Christ sends his people into the world to do,” including “entering into other people’s social and environmental reality.”

Far from rendering one of no earthly good, Harris’s work with A Rocha nicely illustrates that heavenly mindedness takes one deeper into earthly service. As C.S. Lewis once put it so well: “[A] continual looking forward to the eternal world is not, as some modern people think, a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history, you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.” Concern for the present world in turn gives Christian believers common ground with others, which is why even E.O. Wilson has called Harris’s second book, Kingfisher’s Fire: A Story of Hope for God’s Earth, “a unique and inspiring epic.”

FURTHER READING

Orr’s article is “Armageddon vs. Extinction,” Conservation Biology 19 (2005): 290-292. White’s article is “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis” Science 155 (1967):1203-1207. Hitzhusen’s article, highly recommended for those with an interest in the topic, is “Judeo-Christian theology and the environment: moving beyond scepticism to new sources for environmental education in the United States,” Environmental Education Research 13 (2007): 55-74. The literature on Christianity and the environment is now vast. One recent contribution to the literature by a highly regarded theologian is Richard Bauckham’s The Bible and Ecology: Rediscovering the Community of Creation (Baylor, 2010). See also Karl Johnson’s review of E.O. Wilson’s The Creation.

In addition to the blossoming of publications on Christianity and the environment, there are also more and more organizations committed to the care of creation. See, for example, the Ausable Institute, Restoring Eden, and the Evangelical Environmental Network.

Once a year, the world turns upside down. Strangers act friendly, music sounds happy, and even grown-ups go sledding while trees come in from the cold. In remembrance of the First Cause of Festivity, we dust off figurines of mother and child, shepherds and sheep, asses and angels. But why? What’s the connection between the figurines and the festivity?

Some say that what really matters is “the spirit of Christmas.” They value vacation, gift-giving, and “quality time” –in short, the festivity without those religious figurines. But as Chesterton pointed out a century ago, this accomplishes the very opposite of what is intended: “So far from preserving the essentials without the externals, it is rather preserving the externals where there cannot be the essentials.”

Consider weddings. The merry-making, Chesterton says, “is subordinate to the marriage; because it is in honour of the marriage. People came there to be married and not to be merry.” So too with Christmas. Singing and dancing follow from the fact that something actually happened. “The more we are proud that the Bethlehem story is plain enough to be understood by the shepherds, and almost by the sheep, the more do we let ourselves go, in dark and gorgeous imaginative frescoes or pageants about the mystery and majesty of the Three Magian Kings.”

Those who invoke reason over religion, by contrast, are left with no reason for festivity. “People are losing the power to enjoy Christmas through identifying it with enjoyment,” Chesterton writes, for “you cannot suddenly be frivolous unless you believe there is a serious reason for being frivolous.” This is a problem for the religion of rationalism: “Mr. Swinburne does not hang up his stocking on the eve of the birthday of Victor Hugo. Mr. William Archer does not sing carols descriptive of the infancy of Ibsen outside people’s doors in the snow.”

When it comes to mangers and pageants, of course, most are sanitized and sentimentalized. The problem is not primarily the absence of miniature manure, but the lack of context. The Magi did not inquire after a cute baby under a big star, but after “the one who has been born king of the Jews.” In the time of King Herod, these were fighting words.

To re-contextualize such scenes, we might consider adding a King Herod action figure behind the stable. This may not help Precious Moments’ manger marketing, but it would contrast the serenity of the stable with the warfare of the world. Advent, in the words of Fleming Rutledge, “is primarily about the rending of the heavens and the coming of the Lord in power and glory to take the creation back for himself.”

In this context, we see more clearly why mangers matter, and why discarding divinity decreases enjoyment. “The result of dismissing the divine side of Christmas and demanding only the human,” as Chesterton put it, “is that . . . you are asking men to illuminate the town for a victory that has not taken place.” Mangers matter because they signify battle victory.

Of course, figurines do not guarantee festivity, much less faithfulness. Christmas rituals, like all rituals, can be hollow forms. But just as the institution of marriage exists to sustain love, religious rituals exist to sustain faith. Like liturgy and other forms of the faith, those figurines are for facilitating faithfulness and festivity. Chesterton: “The great majority of people will go on observing forms that cannot be explained; they will keep Christmas Day with Christmas gifts and Christmas benedictions; they will continue to do it; and some day suddenly wake up and discover why.” Indeed, the world turns upside down once a year for the simple reason that God became man.

Christian Study Centers do not yet have a recognizable ‘brand.’ As such, they still require explanation. That is why we continue to articulate our vision and mission in our newsletters. Once in a very rare while, somebody not formally affiliated with the movement gets it and even explains it. The following is from an interview with Andy Crouch ’90, posted on Faith & Leadership:

Q: Many secular places like Harvard and Duke have Christian institutions embedded within them. Do these embedded Christian institutions make things possible in the secular environment that would not be possible otherwise?

A: Institutions we call “secular” are much richer and more complicated than that term would imply. For example, there are probably more Christian students at Harvard College, the undergraduate part of Harvard University, now than there have been since the 18th century. The faculty is less monolithically secular than it is imagined to be by those who fear these institutions. This, of course, raises the question, if there is no purely secular institution, what is the place of people of faith within these places?

Actually, the most effective presence of Christians within secular institutions happens when Christians find a way to create lasting patterns of presence, which is to say mini-institutions. The least effective way to be Christian in a secular environment is as an individual who passes through and metaphorically hands out little tracts, witnessing, and then is gone.

You have to make a multigenerational commitment to Christian presence. Probably the most encouraging movement in our time is our Christian study centers that operate in parallel with the university, with deep relational connections to the faculty and administration of the university. They are intended to exist for a long time, accompanying the university in its own quests of teaching, research and service, but in a Christian way.

We have one that is quite robust at the University of Virginia. Cornell, my alma mater, has a great one called Chesterton House. These are relatively recent. They come from the return of evangelical Christians to serious engagement with the academy in the last two generations. They’re very hopeful models of institutional interaction that may be more effective over time than chaplaincies have been.

Chaplaincies often have not seriously engaged the intellectual work of the university, at least not as part of their fundamental purpose. They offered worship environments and spiritual-formation environments but not systematically intellectual environments to ask and address the questions that the university is asking. That’s what Christian study centers provide that chaplaincies often have not provided.

Thank you Andy.

The practice of living in intentional Christian community has ancient roots. The early chapters of the Book of Acts, for example, provide a vivid depiction of commitment to community. Today, in a movement sometimes referred to as the “new monasticism,” young Christian men and women again are pursuing the rigors and rewards of intentional community living. From ancient to modern times, Christians have believed that relationships forged by common commitment are essential to the work of spiritual growth and service.

Not to be left behind, Cornell students are getting in the game. Along with our Director of Undergraduate Programs Justin McGeary, sixteen young men are now busy assembling bookshelves, bunk beds, and barbeque grills in our ministry’s new facility!

Today’s Christian communities tend to explain themselves in the language of “spiritual formation,” the basic idea of which is that we are shaped or formed not just by what we know (in the narrow sense of information acquisition), but also by what we do and what we love. One impetus behind this recent turn to formation is disenchantment with the narrowness of secular education. As even secular critics such as Harvard’s Harry Lewis and Yale’s Anthony Kronman lament, the tendency and temptation to reduce education to vocational training has marginalized matters of meaning and morality. Kronman’s book is entitled Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (Yale, 2007).

Of course, marginalizing morality is simpler said than done. As Parker Palmer put it in To Know As We Are Known (Harper & Row, 1966), “even secular education is a covert type of spiritual formation.” Physics and philosophy, he says, are “‘disciplines’ to which our students are asked to ‘disciple’ themselves. They contain the images of self and the world in which our students are formed.” Our views of self and world, he adds, are also shaped by the university’s system of rewards and punishments. Another reason for the resurgence of interest in spiritual formation is thus the realization that all forms of education–even secular education–are formative.

In the current issue of the Christian Scholar’s Review (theme: “Christian Higher Education as Character Formation”), Perry Glanzer of Baylor University provides a helpful summary of some of the recent literature on this topic, including James Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Baker, 2009). Smith, like Palmer, emphasizes that everyday practices are not neutral. Embedded in everyday practices–he employs the mall and the marketplace as examples–are implicit visions of human flourishing and the good life that shape our desires and imagination, often in unhelpful ways. What we need, Glanzer and Smith believe, is a more robust vision of human flourishing in which Christian worship shapes our desires.

The implications of this insight extend beyond the curricular to the extracurricular and co-curricular aspects of university life, which brings us back to our residential initiative. “I’m worried,” a student announced at one of our information sessions last year, “that my commitment to the house will compete and conflict with my commitment to my studies.” As others nodded in agreement, Justin McGeary responded by articulating the mission and purpose of the house more clearly still. The goal is not to pursue spiritual growth and formation primarily by adding more activities onto already busy schedules, he said, but to create a community where spiritual growth is understood as a 24/7 affair. Everyday practices such as eating and sleeping, cooking and cleaning, are not a mere means toward the end of academic performance but the very context in which we work out our salvation with each other.

This is indeed what we are after at Chesterton House: a Christian living-learning center where young men commit to growing in grace together. To prepare, student residents read Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together (Harper & Row, 1954) over the summer. And on the day before classes, guest theologian Ryan O’Dowd led a devotional on Proverbs 4. “Love her,” a father says to his son of wisdom, the personification of which hints at other desires that commonly distract young men (See Proverbs 5). Indeed, wisdom is what makes university life whole, uniting the curricular, extracurricular, and co-curricular aspects of student life. Knowledge of God and of the world he has made hold together. Academic life and devotional life thus complement rather than compete with each other. Bonhoeffer’s book and O’Dowd’s devotional nicely reinforced McGeary’s manifesto. McGeary is now living in the house to provide guidance and encouragement to the men as they follow through on the commitments they have made to each other and the Lord.

This is a new chapter in the Chesterton House ministry, and we all have a lot to learn as we set ourselves to the task of thinking Christianly not only about physics and philosophy but also about eating and sleeping–the everyday practices that make use of those bunk beds and barbeque grills we’ve been building. It is a great privilege to do this work amidst one of the world’s finest universities, and we thank you for helping to bring us this far. As always, we covet your prayers and appreciate your ongoing financial support, both of which we depend upon as much as ever.

“[S]cientists who care about the public knowledge of science . . . should set forth an agenda for dialogue and deprivatization of discussions about religion, one that emphasizes a more nuanced view of religion and a more realistic view of the limits of science” — Elaine Howard Ecklund

Back in December, a number of ex-evangelicals gathered in New York City to discuss evangelicalism’s relationship to intellectual life. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, “some of America’s brightest contemporary intellectuals gathered at the New School to discuss the tenuous relationship between ‘Evangelicalism and the Contemporary Intellectual.’ The discussion was predictably thoughtful, though evangelical belief was treated as something necessarily dispensed with on the way to becoming a public scholar.” The article, “Winning Not Just Hearts but Minds,” kindly mentioned Chesterton House among recent efforts to “foster the life of the evangelical mind.”

To be sure, anti-intellectualism in the pews is a real problem. Still, this is a strange moment to suggest that becoming an intellectual necessarily entails discarding faith.

First, consider the counterexamples–folks like Francis Collins, who moved from secularism to evangelicalism precisely because he judged the latter to provide more compelling answers to life’s most vexing questions. More importantly, consider the research. As mentioned in our previous post on the de-secularization of the academy, recent research from UCLA shows that increasing numbers of students are practicing not only newer, alternative forms of spirituality but also traditional forms of religion. And according to an article in Philo, the journal of the Society of Humanist Philosophers, “one-quarter or one-third of philosophy professors are theists, with most being orthodox Christians.”

More reason to question glib generalizations about “the tenuous relationship” between evangelicalism and intellectual culture come from Elaine Howard Ecklund’s brand new book Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think. Ecklund is one of several young sociologists of religion who are doing solid, empirical research on what people actually believe. Among the many interesting findings of her study is that young faculty members in the sciences are more religious than their older colleagues, and more religious than those colleagues were when they were young.

All of which is to say that the above-mentioned ex-evangelicals don’t have it quite right. Although losing one’s religion during college is a familiar cultural script, today’s students and young scholars apparently are not interested in conforming to yesterday’s scripts, and for many of them “evangelical” and “intellectual” are complementary rather than competing identities. Moreover, the irony of comments to the effect that “evangelical belief” is “something necessarily dispensed with” on the way to becoming an intellectual is that they so rarely cite any data.

For those interested in lectures and discussions on this general topic that are more informed by data, we recommend Science vs. Religion. “Since surveys of scientists’ religious beliefs began nearly a century ago,” historian Ronald L. Numbers says, “no one has produced a study as deep and broad as Ecklund’s. Surely Science vs. Religion will be the gold standard of such surveys for decades to come.”

He is commonly credited with saving as many as a billion lives. By one expert’s calculation, about half the world’s population sleeps better each night for having consumed grain descended from one of the varieties he helped develop. His biographer called him The Man Who Fed the World, and he was one of only five persons ever to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, and the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet most Americans have never heard of him.

“In the middle of the 20th century,” Bill Gates recently said at the World Food Prize Symposium, “experts predicted famine and starvation, but they turned out to be wrong—because they did not predict Norman Borlaug.”

Borlaug, who died in September at the age of 95, was born in rural Cresco, Iowa. His early life is the stuff of storybooks—born in the family farmhouse, educated in a one-room schoolhouse, and remembered for whistling aloud as he milked the cows. Although he initially failed the entrance exam to the University of Minnesota, he was not easily deterred from his goals. He eventually worked his way through college, including a stint as a Civilian Conservation Corps leader. He witnessed hunger during the Depression, and it left an indelible impression on him.

After taking a doctorate in plant pathology, Borlaug secured a promising post with DuPont in 1942. Just two years later, however, he walked away from it, despite an offer to double his salary. He moved to Mexico in order to head up a new research project designed to improve wheat production amidst food shortages.

Increase production he did, but not before encountering obstacles of every imaginable kind. Not only were the crops diseased and the soil depleted, but the sun was hot and research funds limited. More discouragingly still, he encountered resistance to his ideas among both local farmers and his supervisor, leading him at one point to resign (only to be reinstated by a superior). According to the New York Times, Borlaug “battled illness, forded rivers in flood, dodged mudslides and sometimes slept in tents.” Still, he remained in Mexico for 16 years.

Borlaug helped innovate new techniques, including the selective breeding of wheat to resist a fungus called rust, and “shuttle breeding.” Challenging conventional wisdom, Borlaug tested varieties in diverse climates by transporting or “shuttling” them across great distances, which simultaneously increased the breeding cycles per year and generated crops that were adapted to a wider range of conditions. 

Perhaps Borlaug’s greatest contribution to food production was “dwarfing”—crossbreeding that resulted in shorter, sturdier plants that could support high yields. The results were breathtaking. Within a few years, production per acre increased by a factor of three to four; fifteen years after his arrival, wheat production in Mexico had increased sixfold; eventually, Mexico began exporting wheat.

Although by 1960 his credentials already would have ranked him among the world’s great humanitarians had he chosen to retire, this was Norman Borlaug, and he was just getting started. In the 1960s, when India and Pakistan had a food crisis, they contacted Borlaug, who attempted to deliver 35 truckloads of wheat seeds from Mexico. Again the obstacles were great. Not least of all, Borlaug arrived to find India and Pakistan—his hosts—at war. With artillery flashes literally lighting the sky over their shoulders, Borlaug and his Mexican assistants began sowing the soil with seeds. The image illustrates Borlaug’s conviction that prosperity is a prerequisite of peace. Stunningly, Pakistan was self-sufficient in three years, and India in six.

Curiously, Borlaug’s work was controversial. Some environmentalists were critical of his use of fertilizer, pesticides, and even tractors. “If [Western environmentalists] lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world,” Borlaug responded, “as I have for 50 years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists in wealthy nations were trying to deny them these things.” As Gregg Easterbrook points out in his remembrance of Borlaug, the irony of these criticisms is that high-yield agriculture has preserved forests that otherwise almost certainly would have been converted to pasture, and slowed population growth as education became valued more highly than muscle power.

To be sure, much work remains in balancing food production with conservation, and with food security in general, especially in Africa. In Africa as elsewhere, however, today’s research builds on that of Borlaug. His techniques have been applied to other grains, such as rice, and other nations, including China. Bill Gates, co-chair of the largest foundation in the world, specifically attributes his interest in agricultural development to the successes of the “Green Revolution.”

The details of Borlaug’s life have been made more widely known in articles on the front page of the New York Times and elsewhere in recent weeks. For all the light they shine on Borlaug’s distinguished career, however, most of these articles shed little light on the man.

Most of the reportage on Borlaug entails what the reporters at GetReligion.org (motto: “The press just doesn’t get religion”) call a “holy ghost”—a story about religion that remains invisible. The New York Times article, for example, despite running 2200 words, including mention of “stalwart community of Norwegian immigrants,” nowhere mentions the word “Lutheran.” 

As GetReligion.org puts it, the Times “failed to address the big Why question, leaving readers wondering what motivated Borlaug’s lifelong crusade to combat hunger and famine by increasing food production.” After all, moving to Mexico wasn’t exactly a career move.

According to Rev. David Beckman, President of Bread for the World, Borlaug was “a man of faith and compassion . . . an advocate as well as a scientist.” Indeed, Borlaug was one of the first trustees of Bread for the World (motto: “Have faith. End hunger.”)

For an answer to the big Why question, one need look no further than Borlaug’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “The recognition that hunger and social strife are linked is not new,” Borlaug said, “for it is evidenced by the Old Testament passage ‘and it shall come to pass, that when they shall be hungry, they shall fret themselves, and curse their King and their God.’” Modern scientific and technological skills, he added, may help “Isaiah’s prophesies come true: ‘And the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose… And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water.’”

Easterbrook calls Borlaug a hero—someone “who can provide [a constructive example] to the young.” Although Borlaug surely had aptitudes that many of us do not, in most respects—his self-sacrifice, his determination in the face of failure, and his willingness to live and labor among the poor—he made vivid virtues that can in fact be imitated by most mere mortals. In Asia, Africa, and the Americas, his modus operandi was the same: he saw a need, addressed it with his time and talents, and never gave up.

That Borlaug remains an unfamiliar name to most Americans is unfortunate, but not necessarily surprising. Arguably, there has never been a time and place in history that appreciates the headline: “Remarkable man forsakes lifestyle of rich and famous to serve the poor; dies in relative obscurity.”

This article appeared in the November 2009 edition of The Herald Examiner.

Time was when goodness, beauty, and truth held together. Back in the fourth century, Augustine held that the Good, Beautiful, and True are united as one because they are established in the reality of the one, triune God. At Chesterton House, that is our view as well.

The Christian conviction that all truth is God’s truth characterized much of higher education from the Middle Ages up through the founding of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Harvard’s original motto, for example, was “Veritas in Christi Gloriam” (Truth for the glory of Christ). In the middle of the 19th century, however, educational reformers attempted to ground moral and religious knowledge in science rather than revelation (see Julie Reuben’s The Making of the Modern University). Harvard changed its motto to “Veritas,” and new research universities such as Cornell were founded on the German model that emphasized human reason over against revelation.

In many respects, the modern university has been an extraordinary success. Scientific research in particular has generated both new knowledge and a significant degree of consensus across worldviews. By the 1920s, however, the project of grounding moral and religious knowledge in science had failed. As a result, scientists became content to pursue more specialized research, and the big questions of life were left to the humanities, thereby institutionalizing the fact/value dichotomy espoused by Enlightenment philosophers such as Hume. Simply put, truth and beauty were rent asunder by secularization.

Faith did not fare well amidst these changes. Conservative Protestants voted with their feet and largely withdrew from American universities to start their own Bible colleges. Meanwhile, back on the quad, literary theorists began critiquing the cult of objectivity in science, asserting that truth was relative to one’s story or narrative. Hence the era of diversity and multiculturalism, with its emphasis on race, class, and gender. Religious knowledge claims that aspired to objectivity and universality were largely jettisoned from respectable academic society. In less than a century, the suggestion that God was dead went from the radical writings of Nietzsche (1882) to the cover of Time Magazine (1966).

God, however, has a habit of coming back from the dead, and sociologists are now talking about the “de-secularization” of society. In 1999, Peter Berger published a little book entitled The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics. “The world today is as furiously religious as it ever was,” Berger wrote. The secularization thesis–the idea that modernization inevitably leads to the withering away of religious faith–“is essentially mistaken.” Rodney Stark published an article the same year entitled “Secularization, R.I.P.”

Although nobody seemed to care about these observations at the time, that changed quickly on 9/11. Most obviously, religion has “returned” to politics and diplomacy. “Like many other foreign policy professionals,” former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright wrote a few years ago, “I have had to adjust the lens through which I view the world.” “God is winning in global politics,” concludes an article in Foreign Policy magazine. “And modernization, democratization and globalization have only made him stronger.” (See also “Why God is Winning” and “Kicking the Secularist Habit”.) Even the New Atheism may be understood as a reaction to the pesky persistence of faith in the modern world.

Although universities are behind the curve–highly educated Westerners remain a highly secularized subculture–change is in the air on college campuses as well. A UCLA study recently found that increasing numbers of students are practicing both traditional forms of religion and newer, alternative forms of spirituality. According to Elaine Howard Ecklund, young faculty members in the sciences are more religious than their older colleagues, and more religious than those colleagues were when they were young. Although “the secularization of the university remains a dominant storyline,” write sociologist John Schmalzbauer and coauthor Kathleen Mahoney, “strong evidence indicates a new story needs to be told about religion in the academy.” Timothy Shaw, coauthor of the above-mentioned Foreign Policy article, refers to this story as “the desecularization of the academy.”

The desecularization of the academy entails much more than a mere uptick in student religiosity; it in fact points toward “a new settlement between faith and knowledge.” “American universities,” says Alan Wolfe, yet another sociologist of religion, “increasingly are finding that a century-old truce between the forces of faith and the demands of knowledge is no longer holding.” Contrary to popular opinion, he adds, faith traditions are not a threat to liberal discourse. They are rather resources needed to sustain true dialogue and diversity. In her recent review of Christian Smith’s Souls in Transition, Naomi Schaefer Riley similarly observes that many professors find religious students refreshing because they “have been made to think seriously and speak publicly about Big Questions from a young age.”

Few people have considered these developments more thoroughly than historian John Sommerville who, in The Decline of the Secular University, argued that “the secular university is increasingly marginal to American society and this is a result of its secularism.” Although I once lamented that Sommerville didn’t say how administrators should respond to these observations, his recent Chronicle of Higher Education piece addresses this very question. Administrators, he says, don’t need to do much of anything, other than to “ensure that the rules of debate, of tenure, of recruitment, and of promotion are not tainted by an antireligious agenda. The burden is not on the universities to bring religion into the picture; it is on religious spokespersons to show where such ideas are relevant.” What should “religious spokespersons” do? That is the topic of Sommerville’s recent lecture “How Can We Change the University?”

These are important questions not just for persons of faith, but for everyone. As our guest and Houghton College president Shirley Mullen put it recently, “To what extent do current discussions about spirituality and values reflect a reaction to the modern Western separation of ‘knowledge’ from the categories of faith and values? To what extent are these discussions welcome to those who long for a return to the classical ideal of the academy as home to all Truth, Beauty and Goodness?”

Augustine’s view, and our view, is that the unity of Goodness, Beauty, and Truth is aided by faith in that other Trinity–Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Augustine described his massive work on the Trinity in its opening sentence as “written in order to guard against the sophistries of those who disdain to begin with faith, and are deceived by a crude and perverse love of reason.” Perhaps the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord after all.

The following article recently appeared in Sightings, a publication of the Martin Marty Center for the Advanced Study of Religion.

Last week, the Niels Stensen Foundation, a Jesuit study center in Florence, Italy, convened a conference entitled “The Galileo Affair” to show how recent research “might alleviate the ‘tension and conflict’ still clouding the relationship between the Church and science.” Indeed, four hundred years after the Florentine astronomer’s extraordinary discoveries, we are still assaulted with the message that science and religion are at war. Try telling that, however, to Brother Guy Consolmagno.

Consolmagno is a Jesuit astronomer employed by the Vatican Observatory, where he serves as the curator of an extensive meteorite collection-several specimens of which he has discovered himself. The Vatican began employing astronomers in the nineteenth century, Consolmagno says, “to show the world that the Catholic Church supports science.”

Of course, Vatican support for science is partly public relations. According to the conventional wisdom still taught in schools and repeated by many public intellectuals, Galileo bravely spoke truth (science) to power (the Church), and paid dearly for it, spending his dying days in prison. Except that it’s not true. Ronald L. Numbers’ Galileo Goes to Jail: And Other Myths About Science and Religion, just out from Harvard University Press, is only the most recent attempt to set the historical record straight on “myths”, including its Number Eight: That Galileo Was Imprisoned and Tortured for Advocating Copernicanism. Apparently Carl Sagan’s quip that Galileo was “in a Catholic dungeon threatened with torture” has all the academic rigor of the Indigo Girls song that begins “Galileo’s head was on the block.”

Consider: Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, the source of controversy, previously had been read and approved by the Church’s censors; and Pope Urban VIII, who presided over the trial, was Galileo’s friend and admirer. Consider also: prior to the trial, Galileo stayed in the Tuscan embassy; during the trial, he was put up in a six-room apartment, complete with servant; following the trial, his “house arrest” consisted of being entertained at the palaces of the grand duke of Tuscany and the Archbishop of Siena. Galileo, apparently, was no ordinary heretic.

According to an article by historian David Marshall Miller published last year in the journal History of Science, recent studies of the Galileo Affair have “exploded this ‘myth’ that Galileo’s condemnation was a conflict between science and faith, novelty and authority, or rationality and irrationality.” The Affair, Miller says, was actually occasioned by the Thirty Years War. Indeed, Galileo’s troubles began somewhat suddenly in 1633–just after the Holy Roman Empire suffered setbacks in the war. To make a long story very short: Pope Urban VIII, who had been elected with support of French Cardinals, was suspected and accused of sympathizing with France, which opposed the Empire in the war. In essence, Spaniards and others were wondering, “Is the Pope Catholic?” The apparent contradiction between Galileo’s widely publicized imprisonment and his actual treatment suggests that his trial and “house arrest” were largely symbolic gestures–the Pope’s concession to his political critics, and a way for him to demonstrate his Catholic credentials.

History, like science, teaches us that appearances can be deceiving. Indeed, what appear to be conflicts between science and religion are almost always conflicts over political power and cultural authority. The sin of the Church in the Galileo Affair was not opposing science or free inquiry, but using Galileo as a pawn in what was primarily a political tussle. Perhaps the Stensen Foundation conference will finally put the myth of warfare between science and religion where it belongs–buried alongside the idea that the sun revolves around the earth. Unfortunately, that is not likely. Because the promulgators of the warfare metaphor seem less interested in evidence than in using history for their political and ideological purposes, I suspect the myth of conflict we will have with us always.

In the meantime, Consolmagno delights in doing science. “The amazing thing about meteorites,” he says, “is that you don’t have to go to outer space in order to experience them. Outer space has come to us!” Consolmagno is only one among many people who believe-without conflict–that what is true of meteorites is also true of God himself. In any case, Consolmagno, no less than Galileo, is living proof that “Catholic Astronomer” is not an oxymoron.

I love Ithaca. Partly because there is no end of creative, interesting, and talented people. But I don’t just love the people who pass through. I actually love place itself.

Here is a poem that captures both sides of my affection: a poem about Ithaca, written by one of the many creative students who hangs around Chesterton House happenings.

Praise God, little tree outside the Women’s Community Building. Are you a chinaberry tree? No. Praise God, whatever you are, in the bounty of your tiny red fruits.

Praise God, men and women dressed in brown, carrying your lives on your backs. Praise God, street-side café with your goggle-eyed Chihuahua sign. Praise God, scrap metal horse. Praise God, basement shop full of silky foreign scarves.

Praise God, shoe store so proud of being in Collegetown since before you were born.

Praise God, little tattoo parlor with the brass sign on your inner door, Confessions, 3-5 pm.

Praise God, students. Little crooked streets. Sing your danger, cliffs. Praise God, falling water. Praise God, each one who crosses safely.

Praise God, Beatles played by bells. And the campus looking down on us. Praise God, poodles. Bikes. Clod-hoofed horses. Praise God, five-year-olds, and all you who were once five, and all you who will be five, and you whom death took early.

Praise God, silent smoke-stack factory, you beautiful eyesore: graffitied rooms with hot pink passages in French, upper windows that caught sunset like flame. Your windows are smashed. You have been gulped away by trucks and men in yellow hard hats. Praise God, wrecking crew. Praise God, even though you are gone; for what was brokenly lovely in you is not lost.

Praise God, all you who remain, ashes, crocuses, sunrise flooding the lake.

All you with momentary bodies: Praise God, for He is risen, and the thick choke of your fear is not the final word.

Amen.