Historian of Science and Religion
Forget the complaints about scientists petting space snakes or explorers getting lost with high-tech maps. If you think the Alien prequels failed because of plot-induced stupidity, you have missed the point entirely. While some fans were busy mourning the loss of the Xenomorph as an ancient, unknowable Other, Ridley Scott was staging something far more provocative: a theological [ ]
If you’ve ever felt a wave of nostalgia so sharp it was almost painful, or wondered how a childhood joy could feel so magical then so mundane, then you’ve already begun the journey C. S. Lewis maps out in one of his wisest, most overlooked essays. Most know Lewis as the creator of Narnia or [ ]
In a recent substack article, Craig A. Carter, a professor of theology at Tyndale University, reviews Steven Long’s Natura Pura: On the Recovery of Nature in the Doctrine of Grace. The book tackles a complex 20th-century debate within Roman Catholic theology concerning the concept of pure nature (natura pura). At stake is nothing less than the [ ]
The scene feels like a grim parody of scientific progress: London, late March 1626. An aging Sir Francis Bacon, once Lord Chancellor of England, now fallen from grace but still crackling with intellectual ambition, jostles in a carriage through the snow near Highgate. Spying a chicken pecking scraps in a cottage yard, a sudden inspiration [ ]
We are nothing; let us be everything! Across the first ten chapters of The Kingdom of Man, Rémi Brague has charted modernity’s grand project: the systematic effort to establish human sovereignty over nature, knowledge, and morality. From Bacon’s vision of restoring man’s lost dominion to Descartes’s methodological conquest of certainty, and from Locke’s labor-driven theory of [ ]
Two recent calls for papers piqued my interest. I ve submitted abstracts to both and will share them here. While I don’t yet know if they will be accepted, I intend to write the essays regardless and potentially submit them to a journal or magazine. Call for Papers: Notre Dame Conference The de Nicola Center for [ ]
The modern world is not the triumph of reason, but the revenge of Prometheus. In The Kingdom of Man, Rémi Brague presents a formidable critique of modernity not as the triumph of human reason but as the culmination of a metaphysical rebellion—one that sought to replace divine order with human sovereignty. Having already examined the medieval [ ]
William Placher and Denys Turner, though separated by geography and academic focus, converged on a shared mission: to confront modernity’s relentless effort to shrink the mystery of God into categories palatable to human reason or emotion. Placher, an American theologian and philosopher of religion, spent much of his career at Wabash College in Indiana, where [ ]
In a recent post, I argued that the future of the science-faith dialogue depends less on physicists and more on theologians—those trained to grapple with Scripture, tradition, and the existential dimensions of belief. One reader, in a rather cheeky tone, urged me to “catch up” on philosophers like Bas van Fraassen, Hans Halvorson, Alex Pruss, [ ]
In the modern dialogue between science and Christian theology, two names loom large: John Polkinghorne and Wolfhart Pannenberg. Both sought to reconcile faith with the empirical rigor of the natural sciences, yet their approaches diverge in ways that reveal a deeper, often unspoken tension in the conversation. Polkinghorne, the physicist-turned-theologian, is frequently cited as a [ ]