Inside
NCR
Two unusually warm days this past
week forced an explosion of spring in our little chunk of the Midwest. The deep
color of the native redbuds, almost a Lenten purple, helps keep me on track
amid the premature alleluia shout of brilliant magnolias and Bradford pears, of
dogwood and forsythia.
It is Holy Thursday as I write this, and I admit a certain
enchantment at the bittersweet mingling of the uplift I feel this time of year
with the somber stories we will contemplate through Saturday night.
Religion and science have been doing
this wonderfully fascinating dance of avoidance since, well, since each
realized it had powerful insights into who we are, why we act the way we do and
how the natural world operates. The two disciplines approach each other like an
awkward couple, suspicious of each others intentions and not quite
certain yet of their compatibility.
Certainly, there are many exceptions, as Rich Heffern writes in
this weeks cover story: hard-nosed theorists rigorously faithful to
the data and willing to go wherever it leads, yet with a touch of wonder in
their eye, who see the living world as though turning a childs
kaleidoscope. For them, science and religion profoundly enhance each
other.
On the religion side, some might be suspicious of any scientific
affirmation that we are hard-wired to seek the divine as a diminution of our
will to seek God, suspicious that scientists are saying the brain
causes prayer. I suspect, however, that more are inclined to view the
whole matter with the awe expressed by physician-author Andrew Newberg, who
responds, Were not simply saying that the brain creates God, rather
that the brain has quite naturally developed the mechanisms for religious
experiences.
Have evolution and biology given us, as Newberg calls them,
the neural paving stones leading to God?
Heffern navigates the pathways of the latest research on the
biology of religion in a lucid and engaging way. We dont
expect any public service ads showing up soon to balance out the old This
is your brain on drugs ads, but the stories inside make a rather
convincing case for Your brain on prayer.
Its tucked away among the
briefs, but deserves special notice. Bishop Michael Fitzgerald, secretary of
the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, which makes him a Vatican
official, recently praised the theological work of Jesuit Fr. Jacques Dupuis.
Dupuis, of course, was recently investigated by the Vatican, and his work was
publicly criticized as containing notable ambiguities or
difficulties.
Fitzgerald, acknowledging the critique, expressed his gratitude to
Dupuis for his pioneering work and termed theology a developing
science in which various theories will naturally be presented,
discussed and brought into a synthesis. Shows to what degree, perhaps,
the Vatican is anything but a monolith.
-- Tom Roberts
My e-mail address is troberts@natcath.org
National Catholic Reporter, April 20,
2001
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