Religious Naturalism

Wesley Wildman

tfindlay — Sun, 16 Oct 2022 16:49:30 +0000

Wesley Wildman is a Professor of Philosophy, Theology, and Ethics at the Boston University School of Theology, maintaining deep ties to his native Australia.Wesley is a pre-eminent philosopher of the religious naturalist orientation, a member of the RNA Board of Advisors, and is also engaged in numerous other fascinating projects as detailed in the wiki entry and on his own website.

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Carol White

tfindlay — Sun, 16 Oct 2022 16:47:27 +0000

Carol White is Professor of Religious Studies at Bucknell University, and a member of the RNA Board of Advisors. We recently each gave talks at a conference on religious naturalism and I was blown away by her presentation. She’s sent me her powerpoint file, and while it lacks her outstanding images and voiceovers, the text conveys the wonderful places where she’s taking her RN orientation.

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Andreas Weber

tfindlay — Sun, 16 Oct 2022 16:45:00 +0000

Andreas Weber, an at-the-bench neuroscientist turned writer, has authored three books: The Biology of Wonder: Aliveness, Feeling, and the Metamorphosis of Science, Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology, and Enlivenment: Toward a Poetics for the Anthropocene. Andreas takes us with him on immersive, often mystical, journeys into the natural world that call for curling up with his books in a…

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Lewis Thomas

tfindlay — Sun, 16 Oct 2022 16:42:19 +0000

Lewis Thomas joins the small but might panoply of distinguished scientists who have stepped out to tell the rest of us about what’s being discovered and to offer heart-felt reflections on these understandings. His premier book, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher, was published almost 40 years ago and continues to resonate fully, as evinced by the quotes below. Here’s a trove of Lewis…

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Brian Swimme

tfindlay — Sun, 16 Oct 2022 16:40:25 +0000

Brian Swimme trained as an astrophysicist and then joined up with Mary Evelyn Tucker, John Grim, and others at the Riverdale Center for Religious Research , founded by Thomas Berry, to explore the spiritual and moral implications of Everybody’s Story. His 1984 book, The Universe is a Green Dragon, was important to me, and doubtless many others, in honing my cosmic sensibilities, and he went on to…

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Carl Sagan

tfindlay — Sun, 16 Oct 2022 16:33:01 +0000

The joyous and essential Carl Sagan, like Rachel Carson, has become a household name, largely because of his splendid 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, the most widely watched series in the history of public television, seen by at least 500 million people in 60 countries. A professor of astronomy at Cornell, he made important scientific contributions before becoming a public…

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Loyal Rue

tfindlay — Sun, 16 Oct 2022 16:30:48 +0000

Philosopher Loyal Rue is regarded by many of us as a key figure in the development of the religious naturalist orientation. In his first book, Amythia, he lifted up the tragic absence of a common planetary Mythos and suggested that our understandings of Nature could serve as its foundation. That we are star-born and earth-formed are no less important to self-understanding than the many features…

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Chet Raymo

tfindlay — Sun, 16 Oct 2022 16:28:13 +0000

Chet Raymo, a retired Professor of Physics at Stonehill College, is a mystic, journalist and writer, notably of the wonderfully titled When God is Gone, Everything Is Holy: The Making of a Religious Naturalist. Some lucid quotes: The dark night was the first book of poetry and the constellations were the poems. Beauty soaks reality as water fills a rag. I weigh out nebulas. I dam up the Milky…

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V. V. Raman

tfindlay — Sun, 16 Oct 2022 16:25:59 +0000

VV, as he is known, just celebrated his 90th birthday in fine fettle. A native of Calcutta and trained in theoretical physics in France, he held the wonderful title of Professor of Physics and Humanities at the Rochester Institute of Technology until his retirement, and is a member of the RNA Board of Advisors. He has written and spoken in many forums on the relationship between the scientific…

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Maria Popova

tfindlay — Sun, 16 Oct 2022 16:23:41 +0000

Maria Popova sends out a weekly blog called The Marginalian. Her mission is to couple our science-based understandings with the arts in all sorts of vibrant ways. She has written an outstanding book called Figuring from which most of the quotes below derive, and has for several years hosted a magnificent charitable event called The Universe in Verse with excerpts here. She writes: “Be curious.

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