India: Catholics: Ex-nun's new book blasts monastic life and Roman Catholic Church, needs reformation in India

Tony Therakan writes for Reuters (Jun29,2k9) about Sister Jesme's new book in English, published locally in India, Amen: the autobiography of a nun (the author served 33 years in service thru the Church she critiques).

World Religions: Book Review: UK's 'New Stateman" on Micklethwait's and Wooldbridge's book, God Is Back

John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge have a book published recently, God Is Back: How the global rise of faith is changing the world (Allen Lane, 405pp, £25). JM is editor of The Economist; AW is the latter's bureau chief in Washington, DC; one is Catholic, the other atheist, says the reviewer. The reviewer is John Gray (NS,May21,2k9). "Contrary to what evangelical rationalists preach, it is perfectly possible both to be modern and to believe in God. But there is no reason to assume that the American religious model will prevail" -- the headline writer has outdone him/herself by setting "evangelical rationalists" (there actually are many Evangelicals who are rationalists philosophically -- you prove God is true in an exercize called "apologetics") as the primary opposition that the authors have in mind, if Gray's review is at all accurate.

Whether Marxian or Millian, socialist or liberal, secular rationalists have held one tenet in common: religion belongs to the infancy of the species; the more modern a society becomes, the less room there is for religious belief and practice. Never questioned, this is what lies behind the hot-gospel sermons of evangelical atheists: if you want to be modern, say goodbye to God.

At bottom, the assertion that religion is destined to die out is a confession of faith. No amount of evidence will persuade secular believers that they are on the wrong side of history, but one of the achievements of God Is Back is to show how implausible, if not ridiculous, their view of history actually is.

The notion that modernity and religion are at odds is a generalisation from the experience of some parts of Europe. Europe is now largely post-Christian and the majority no longer follows any conventional creed, but things are otherwise in much of the rest of the world, and notably so in the US, which, during most of its history, has been intensely religious and self-consciously modern.

European Enlightenment thinkers have tended to see the US as the exception that proves the rule – an unexplained lag in a universal trend towards secularisation.

So, as Gray points out but his headline writer ignores, it is "the hot-gospel sermons of evangelical atheists," most of them rationalists philosophically and religiously, but definitely not Christians, definitely not Evangelicals.

While Gray and perhaps the authors borrow the analysis of reformational philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd (but without attribution), the book goes on to make also its own analysis of God-centered monotheisms and the great trends regarding religion in the world today. The authors via Gray clarify for many readers that "if there is any trend that can be discerned in the parts of the world that are most rapidly modernising, it is that secular belief systems are in decline and the old faiths are being reborn." And new ones are being created everyday.

Arguing that “the great forces of modernity – technology and democracy, choice and freedom – are all strengthening religion rather than undermining it”, they go on to claim that one version of modernity is spreading nearly everywhere. “The world is generally moving in the American direction, where religion and modernity happily coexist,” they write. At this point the authors ... emerge as missionaries for the American Way, and the argument becomes distinctly implausible.

Gray then goes on to make his own point, which points him thoroly away from Christianity and monotheism, to (of all things) the Confucian-culture religion, which is not multi-gods (like Hinduism) nor monotheist (but only in the strict sense of a kind of worship of the state (used to be the Emporer's cult in China), the great Kung-Fu heritage of traditional rules of macro-etiquette to advance societal cohesion, and nationalism on the Empire-scale of presentday China. Gray ignores the intense advance of Christianity in China, and the fact that nationalism and despair with Communism as such, is what drives the rebirth of Confucianism there.

Science: Astronomy: Discovery of seeming source of intermediate-size black holes, a new class in taxonomy of this science

Nature via ScienceDaily (July 2, 2009) reports that "A new class of black hole, more than 500 times the mass of the Sun, has been discovered by an international team of astronomers."

The finding in a distant galaxy approximately 290 million light years from Earth is reported today in the journal Nature.

Until now, identified black holes have been either super-massive (several million to several billion times the mass of the Sun) in the centre of galaxies, or about the size of a typical star (between three and 20 Solar masses).

The new discovery is the first solid evidence of a new class of medium-sized black holes. The team, led by astrophysicists at the Centre d'Etude Spatiale des Rayonnements in France, detected the new black hole with the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton X-ray space telescope.

"While it is widely accepted that stellar mass black holes are created during the death throes of massive stars, it is still unknown how super-massive black holes are formed," says the lead author of the paper, Dr Sean Farrell, now based at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leicester.

He added: "One theory is that super-massive black holes may be formed by the merger of a number of intermediate mass black holes. To ratify such a theory, however, you must first prove the existence of intermediate black holes.

"This is the best detection to date of such long sought after intermediate mass black holes. Such a detection is essential. While it is already known that stellar mass black holes are the remnants of massive stars, the formation mechanisms of supermassive black holes are still unknown."

"The identification of HLX-1 is therefore an important step towards a better understanding of the formation of the super-massive black holes that exist at the centre of the Milky Way and other galaxies."

A black hole is a remnant of a collapsed star with such a powerful gravitational field that it absorbs all the light that passes near it and reflects nothing.

It had been long believed by astrophysicists that there might be a third, intermediate class of black holes, with masses between a hundred and several hundred thousand times that of the Sun. However, such black holes had not been reliably detected until now.

This new source, [has been] dubbed HLX-1 for Hyper-Luminous X-ray source 1.

Piesteutics: Calvin09 countdown: Jun2k10, Uniting General Council of global communion of reformed churches

The World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC) and the Reformed Ecumenical Council (REC) have agreed to join together in the World Communion of Reformed Churches (WCRC) a year from now, in June 2010 at a uniting General Council to be held in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

The executive committees of the

World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC) and the

Reformed Ecumenical Council (REC),

meeting jointly for the first time [two weeks or so ago] in Geneva, , approved a draft constitution for a new organization to be called the

World Communion

of

Reformed

Churches

Use of the word “c o m m u n i o n”

implies that member denominations of the new organization will accept the ordination of each others’ clergy and respect the rites of each tradition. The draft constitution for the new organization says “no individual or church may claim precedence or dominance over another.”

The move signals a significant step towards unity among Reformed churches which have splintered into separate denominations over the years since the Protestant Reformation was launched in 16th century Europe.

“The decision is in line with John Calvin’s commitment to Christian unity,” says Setri Nyomi, WARC’s General Secretary referring to the early church reformer. “It signals that Reformed churches today are ready to do their part.”

[WARC is the much larger of the two merging entities that are now in process of transitioning to organizational-global unity. I shall have to look up the statistics as to the size of their comparative memberships, if I can find these numbers, to make a good comparison. ...Hours later I stumbled onto the info I was desiring, and here it is in regard to the global statistics of both of the two uniting synods (councils):

The leaders of two worldwide Reformed church groupings have proposed the creation of a new global body called the World Reformed Communion * to unite the more than 80 million Protestants in their two organizations."We believe that this new, united, Reformed body will be a blessing to the broader ecumenical movement and to the reconciliation of the world," said Rev. Clifton Kirkpatrick, president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC), and Rev. Douwe Visser, president of the Reformed Ecumenical Council (REC), in a joint statement.

Geneva-based WARC has 75 million members in 218 churches in 107 countries, including The Presbyterian Church in Canada. In Michigan USA, in comparison, the

GrandRapids-headquartered REC has member churches in 25 countries with 12 million members belonging to 40 churches.

refWrite Commentary: Altho, as they are reported above, the numbers "75m + 12 m" =/= "80 millions," (which latter, the reader may recall, is the combined figure presented at the very beginning of the report at hand, same media source)-- so, strictly calculating, not "more than 80 million members," rather nearly 10% more members worldwide, above the former WARC's membership-statistics previous total-figure, in total 87 millions to be precise. Of course, perhaps the figures received have been refined by the reporting denominations, and who would be better informed on the latest revisions of over-all statistics for WARC and REC than would be the reverends Clifton Kilpatrick and Douwe Visser.

[Back to the report in ENI via PresbyChCanada's mag Record: ] The draft constitution will be presented for approval by delegates of the two organizations at the

Uniting General Council

of the new WCRC, to be held in

Grand Rapids, United States, June 2010.

--from WARC press release Geneva, via Presbyterian Church of Canada magazine, Presbyterian Record.

refWrite Commentary: Theoretically, "communion" means that the Christian Reformed denomintion's CRC Council in Canada will become a denominational participant in a four-factor inter-clericality toward freeflow ministerial interchange, ahem. The four factors will be the competing traditions within each Canadian denomination, and the efforts (of churches and individual members formerly within and perhaps protected somewhat by both of the two former denominational world-organizations), their/our efforts to adjust to the wider spectrum of Reformed diversity and accompanied perhaps by even some balkanizing tendencies within one or more denoms along that widely stretched spectrum of reformed communities on their way together toward inter-church communion:

* the United Church of Canada,

* the Presbyterian Church of Canada,

* the Reformed Church in Canada -- affiliated with its sister Reformed Church in America.

* the Council of Christian Reformed Churches in Canada (CCRC) -- affiliated within the international Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRCNA).

More Calvin500 -- 2009 Calvin Quincentenary (June 14)

The 16th-century teaching of Jean Calvin can inspire a "reformation of values" in the face of the economic and ecological crises that confront the world, a Swiss politician has said at a ceremony to mark the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformer's birth.

"We have forgotten how to respect nature, we are no longer in solidarity with the poorest," Swiss federal cabinet minister Moritz Leuenberger told the 14 June ceremony in Geneva organized by the Federation of Swiss Protestant Churches.

"We have pushed back the limits of liberty and we have lost our sense of orientation," said Leuenberger, delivering the keynote address at the event to honour Calvin, known for his role in Geneva's Protestant Reformation.

Calvin once wrote, "if we have to live, we also have to make use of the means necessary for our lives … We therefore have to respect some measure, both for our needs and for our enjoyment," recalled Leuenberger, who heads the federal department of the environment, transport, energy and communications of Switzerland.

-- Ecumenical News International

--------------

*World Reformed Communion -- this innovative terminology sounds a bit like a trojan horse to introduce the frame-setting Zwinglian "remembrance only" idea of "communion" (no real presence, but the real absence of Our Ascended Lord Jesus Christ who sits enthroned at the R+t Hand of God (to be sure), but does not communicate Himself by the Spirit to be the Real Presence with us and in us, in the communion service) -- that notion of communion. Many churches in the World Communion of Reformed Churches don't practice a Calvin-enriched understanding of communion, but only Zwinglian variants instead watered-down to satisfy the proto-Mennonites in the Church of Zurich under Zwingli.

**semiotics: visually-enriched cultivation of found texts > sizing, placing & coloring as digital meaning-layering parallel to semantic layering via visual syntax plays, by Albert Gedraitis, refWrite publisher [the publisher as typesetter].

Science: Academic Exchange: Calvin College philosophers on star-studded exchange with philosophers in China

June 16-19:
Science, Philosophy and Belief
Conference at Peking University, Beijing, China

In June 2009, the project will hold an exciting four-day conference at Peking University [I thawt the proper spelling was now "Beijing"--huh?]. The conference will include major keynote speakers such as Nobel laureate William Phillips, Gerald Gabrielse (Chair of Harvard’s Physics department), Alvin Plantinga (John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame). This meeting will include presentations by other Chinese and Western scholars.

Conference Directors
Dr. Kelly James Clark
Professor Xu Xiangdong
Professor Xing Taotao

The conference is co-sponsored by

* Institute of Foreign Philosophy,
Peking University

* Philosophy Department,
Calvin College

* Society of Christian Philosophers

* Nagel Institute

In addition, Kelly James Clark, Michael Murray and Del Ratzsch will direct an intensive seminar for selected Chinese students the week prior to the conference.

Further details will be added as the conference approaches.

The conference is free and open to the public.

Conference Speakers

Katherine Blundell, Astrophysicist, is a University Research Fellow of the Royal Society and a Science Research Fellow of St John's College, Oxford University. She is co-author of Concepts in Thermal Physics (Oxford University Press).

Susan P. Bratton is Chair of Environmental Studies at Baylor University. She specializes in environmental ethics and is the author of Six Billion and More: Human Population Regulation and Christian Ethics, and Christianity Wilderness and Wildlife: The Original Desert Solitaire.

Gerald Gabrielse is George Vasmer Leverett Professor of Physics, Harvard University. Prof. Gabrielse leads the international ATRAP Collaboration whose goal is accurate laser spectroscopy with trapped antihydrogen atoms. He was awarded the 2002 Davisson-Germer Prize by the American Physical Society "for pioneering work in trapping, cooling, and precision measurements of the properties of matter and antimatter in ion traps."

William Phillips is a leading researcher in ultra-low temperature atomic physics at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Atomic Physics Division. Phillips was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1997 for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.

Alvin Plantinga is the John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Warranted Christian Belief, Warrant and Proper Function, God, Freedom & Evil, and The Nature of Necessity.

Eleonore Stump is The Robert J. Henle Professor of Philosophy at Saint Louis University. Prof. Stump's many publications include The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, and Aquinas in the series “Arguments of the Philosophers.”

Seminar Directors

Kelly James Clark is Professor of Philosophy at Calvin College and Executive Director of the Society of Christian Philosophers. He is author of over fifty articles and author, co-author or editor of over a dozen books including Return to Reason, The Story of Ethics, Philosophers Who Believe, When Faith is Not Enough, 101 Key Philosophical Terms and Their Importance for Theology, Five Views on Apologetics, and Faith, Philosophy and Film.

Michael J. Murray is the Arthur and Katherine Shadek Professor in the Humanities and Philosophy at Franklin and Marshall College (Lancaster, PA). In addition to a variety of articles in the history of philosophy and the philosophy of religion, he has published Philosophy of Religion: The Big Questions (Blackwell, with Eleonore Stump), Reason for the Hope Within (Eerdmans), and has two books forthcoming: Philosophy of Religion (Cambridge, with Michael Rea) and Nature Red in Tooth and Claw: Theism and the Problem of Animal Suffering (Oxford).

Del Ratzsch is Chair of the Philosophy Department at Calvin College (Grand Rapids, MI.). His work includes Science and its Limits (InterVarsity), The Battle of Beginnings (InterVarsity), and Nature, Design and Science (in the State University of New York "Philosophy and Biology" series). His work has been translated into a number of languages including Chinese and Korean.

Xu Xiangdong is Professor of Philosophy at Peking University. He got his PhD from Columbia University in 2002 under the supervision of Thomas Pogge and Philip Pettit. He is the author of over 45 articles and five books: Liberalism, Social Contract and Political Justification (2004), Skepticism, Knowledge and Justification (2005), Moral Philosophy and Practical Reason (2006), The Self, Others and Morality (2006), and Making Sense of Free Will (2008).

Pisteutics: History: Jonathan Edwards Center created at UFS Theology, Bloemfontein, South Africa

Why study Jonathan Edwards in South Africa?

The Faculty of Theology at the University of the Free State (UFS) will establish a Jonathan Edwards Centre for Southern Africa, affiliated with the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, USA.

This strategic partnership exemplifies the vision of the Faculty of Theology to be an internationally renowned theological and training faculty.

The UFS Jonathan Edwards Centre will serve as a research, education and publication hub for the study of Edwards and evangelical history and develop links with the international academic community.

Prof. Francois Tolmie, Dean of the Faculty of Theology at the UFS, said, “I welcome the plans to pay sustained critical attention to Edwards’s thought. Jonathan Edwards was an important American theologian, philosopher and more specifically America's greatest contributor to mission theology in Southern Africa.”

Dr Kenneth Minkema, Executive Director of the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University, adds: “The establishment of the Jonathan Edwards Center Southern Africa at the UFS in Bloemfontein is a significant expansion of Edwards scholarship and will serve widely both academia and the church.”

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), pastor, revivalist, Christian philosopher, missionary, and president of Princeton University, is widely regarded as North America’s greatest theologian. He is the subject of intense scholarly interest because of his significance as an historical figure and the profound legacy he left on America’s religious, political and intellectual landscapes.

In recent years, a rapidly growing interest in Edwards as theologian has brought the man and his writings onto the world stage, pressing beyond the popular and more parochial image of Edwards primarily as American preacher and American historic figure. Increasingly, his writings are being consulted by religious leaders, pastors, and churches around the world, spurred by a growing recognition of the fervency and universality of the Edwards message and the acumen with which he appraised religious experience.

This interest in Edwards globally has been fuelled in part by the work of the Jonathan Edwards Centre at Yale University, whose sole mission is to support inquiry into the life, writings, and legacy of Jonathan Edwards by providing resources that encourage critical appraisal of the historical importance and contemporary relevance of America’s premier theologian. The primary means to achieve this is with the The Works of Jonathan Edwards Online, a digital learning environment for research, education and publication that presents all of Edwards’s writings, along with helpful editorial materials that allow the reader to examine Edwards's thought in incredibly powerful, useful ways. The Works of Jonathan Edwards Online 2.0 is accessible through the Centre’s website at: www [dot] edwards [dot] yale [dot] edu.

In the immediately foregoing, Remove each instance of the word "dot," remove each along with its enclosing brackets [], and replace that set with one dot exactly.... {To me, the immediately foregoing is a fun semiotics display, dare I publically enjoy it myself? It is overwraut, to be sure -- but comically, comedically so, I felt in coining it.}

UFS webpage says: "The University of the Free State is one of South Africa's oldest universities, and celebrated its centenary in 2004. The UFS is an important research centre. Our seven faculties offer a full range of under- and postgraduate programmes to our more than 25,000 students.

[The seven faculties are: Humanities, Law, Natural and Agricultural Sciences, Economic and Management Sciences, Education, Health Sciences, Theology. UFS Theology is supportively affiliated with two free-standing church-related pastoral-training institutions: Namibia Evangelical Theological College, Windhoek, Namibia and Justo Mwale Theological College, Lusaka, Zambia. Of course, the other UFS faculties have international connections in their own disciplines.]

The University is a multicultural and multi-lingual institution with parallel-medium instruction (English and Afrikaans). "We are recognised as a leader in transformation and are committed to serving the community."

Sept 2-4: 8th South African Calvin Research Congress, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa.

CALVIN AS CATECHIST

Theologians, historians as well as students and researchers in related or relevant disciplines are invited to submit papers for the international 8th South African Calvin Research Congress entitled Calvin as Catechist. The Congress will be held at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, Free State, South Africa, from 2-4 September 2008 and is hosted by the UFS Institute for Classical and Reformation Studies in collaboration with the UFS Faculty of Theology.

For the theme Calvin as Catechist his catechetic publications of 1537/38 (CO 5,313-354; OS I,426-432; COR III/II) and 1542/45 (CO 6,1-160) as well as the Confession des Escholiers (CO 9,721-730) and the De Exposition du Catéchisme (Jean Calvin, Deux congrégations et exposition du Catechisme [Cahiers de la Revue d'Histoire et de Philosophie Religieuses] (Paris, 1964), ed. R. Peter, XXV-XXXIII, 32-44) should be regarded as primary sources. (Important secondary literature includes: Veer, M.B. van ’t, 1942. Catechese en catechetiese stof bij Calvijn. Kampen: Kok.)

More: Prominent UFS Admin and Prof, D. F. M. Strauss (born 1946, Bloemfontein) is a South-African philosopher and the world's leading expert on the theory of modal aspects, and its correlate modal-scale theory, one of the core features of the thought of Dutch philosopher, Herman Dooyeweerd, and the movement for Reformational philosophy.

Danie, to use this scholar's nickname, studied under an adherent of Dooyeweerd's philosophy, Hendrik Van Riessen and attended some lectures of Dooyeweerd's brother-in-law, DHTh Vollenhoven, professor of philosophy at the Free University in Amsterdam. Since that time Strauss has written voluminously in both Afrikaans and English on numerous contemporary philosophical themes.

Professor Strauss teaches at the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, Republic of South Africa. He served for two-and-a-half years at the Dooyeweerd Centre at Redeemer University College, Ancaster, Ontario, Canada; he maintains a strong relation with the Centre and serves as General Editor of the Collected Works of Herman Dooyeweerd, published by Edwin Mellen Press (Lewiston, N.Y.)

Pisteutics: Physics / Climate Sciences: Freeman Dyson's dissatisfaction with Climate Change rhetoric and math models

When a brilliant aged physicist turns the hermeneutic of suspicion on the Climate Change scientists, who have a vested interest in doomsday scenarios, he explains his views on the basis of systematic disbelief of their particular claims that can't be satisfactorily proved. "Freeman Dyson Takes On The Climate Establishment" (Jun4,2k9): Interview by Michael D. Lemonick in Yale Environment 360

Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson has been roundly criticized for insisting global warming is not an urgent problem, with many climate scientists dismissing him as woefully ill-informed. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Dyson explains his iconoclastic views and why he believes they have stirred such controversy.

On March 3, The New York Times Magazine created a major flap in the climate-change community by running a cover story on the theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson that focused largely on his views of human-induced global warming.

Basically, he doesn’t buy it.

The interviewer, Michael D. Lemonick:

Michael D. Lemonick is the senior writer at Climate Central, a nonpartisan organization whose mission is to communicate climate science to the public. Prior to joining Climate Central, he was a senior writer at Time magazine, where he covered science and the environment for more than 20 years. He has also written four books on astronomical topics and has taught science journalism at Princeton University for the past decade. In a recent article for Yale Environment 360, Lemonick wrote that, with the intensifying effects of climate change, a 2007 report by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is already outdated.

Pisteutics: Scientology: Wikipedia at war with Scientologists seeking to control image of Church in encyclopedia

Wikipedia vs. Scientology Church, "Wikipedia Blocks Church of Scientology From Editing Entries -- Online Encyclopedia Says Church -- and Critics -- Pushed Own Agendas" ABC News (recent) by Ki Mae Heussner and Ned Potter.