The how and why of publishing

This week at the conference on the Academy and the Church there will be a special workhop on "Getting published". I will be speaking on "The how and why of publishing in peer-reviewed journals". The audience will mostly be faculty and postgraduate students from theological colleges. I welcome any feedback on my draft slides.

Modelling forgiveness

Last night my family and I watched the movie, Invictus which chronicles how Nelson Mandela used the 1995 Rugby World Cup to unify South Africa ["balancing black aspirations with white fears."] just after the end of apartheid. The movie shows the importance and power of forgiveness. It is challenging that Mandela could forgive whites for his thirty year imprisonment, mistreatment of his family, and much social injustice. Furthermore, he models this forgiveness with great integrity and effect on those around him.

Its time to talk about time

Time is created. Time has a direction. Time will end.

Humanity is created to live in time. Humanity is constrained. We are creatures.

Time is something that we experience and cannot escape from. There is past, present, and future. Man lives in history. God acts in history.

Einstein's Theory of General Relativity together with observations

in cosmology imply a "big bang" in the past, leading to a physical

picture in which both space and time had a beginning.

Physics can say nothing about "time" "before" the big bang.

Time will end, either in a black hole or at the "big crunch".

Poverty is an affront to God's glory

One of the speakers I am really looking forward to hearing at the forthcoming conference on the Church and the Academy is Michael Woolcock. He is currently Professor of Social Science and Development Policy at the University of Manchester, where he is on leave from the World Bank.

He will be speaking on theology, poverty, and development.

An earlier version of his paper is available here. The abstract includes the following fascinating ideas:

In the realm of theology, I argue that justice is a necessary but insufficient foundation for concern about poverty, proposing that St. Irenaeus of Lyons’ contentions regarding the nature of ‘glory’ be further explored. I develop a theology of glory based on three scriptural understandings, namely grandeur, grace, and gratitude, and argue that we are most “fully alive” when we are in right relationship with ourselves, each other, and God. Poverty is an affront to God’s glory, then, because it is both a cause and consequence of broken relationships.

Napoleon and the God hypothesis

Pierre Simon Laplace (1749 - 1827) was a very famous French mathematician.
One of his great works was ``Mechanique celeste''. This book took many of Isaac Newton's ideas and reworked them into a mathematical form that made it possible to quantify the motion of the planets.

There is a famous story about Laplace meeting Napoleon Bonaparte. [The following account is based on Rouse Ball's, A Short account of the History of Mathematics].

Laplace went to beg Napoleon to accept a copy of his work. But, someone had told Napoleon that the book contained no mention of the name of God. Napoleon, who was fond of putting embarrassing questions, took the book and commented, ``Monsieur Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator."

Laplace, answered bluntly, ``Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothese-le.'' [I have no need of that hypothesis].

Napoleon, greatly amused, told this reply to Lagrange, (another famous mathematician) who exclaimed, ``Ah! c'est une belle hypothese; a explique beaucoup de choses.' ["Ah, but it is such a beautiful hypothesis; it explains a great many things!"]

This story represents a common misunderstanding about the respective roles of science and theology and the relationship between them. Just because we can explain something scientifically does NOT mean that God is not involved in it.

It is true that before the development of science many natural phenomena people saw and experienced seemed to be random and hard to understand. Examples include hurricanes, floods, disease, the motion of the sun, and the ocean tides.

Many religions said these things happened because a god made them happen. If people made sacrifices to this god maybe bad things would not happen.

However, the development of science let to explanations of many natural phenomena in terms of cause and effect. For example, because of gravity the earth orbits the sun
and the moon orbits the earth. This allows us to explain the ocean tides and their regularity.

So now we don't need religious explanations to explain natural phenomena, whether it is the weather or the structure and properties of atoms. But, these explanations never explain who or what is behind these laws of nature.

An indigenous Australian on Obama

Noel Pearson is a prominent indigenous leader in Australia. He is also a columnist for the Australian newspaper. Normally he writes about Australian issues, often with quite a unique perspective. But today he has a column about US politics, Obama misses a historic opportunity.

He considers that Obama should have focused his reform efforts on the finance industry rather than on health care. This led to him losing support among white working poor. It wasn't just that Wall Street fat cats got even richer, but irresponsible borrowers from Main Street got bailed out.

The purpose of government

In order to illustrate the real purpose of the church, C.S. Lewis discusses the real purpose of government. Although this is an aside to his main point I thought it was interesting in its own right.

Just as it is easy to think the State has a lot of different objects-military, political,economic, and what not. But in a way things are much simpler than that. The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden-that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time.

Mere Christianity, Book III, chapter 8.