With the memory of meeting Catholic Scientists still fresh on my mind, I travelled to a Franciscan conference. The occasion was the 800th anniversary of the death of St. Francis of Assisi and his passing into eternal life. Both the Order and society are changing in fundamental ways, and we…

Over the past ten years, which is not very long by the standards of scientific societies, the Society of Catholic Scientists has held annual meetings. I attended most of them. But how is being a Catholic Christian part of being a scientist? We believe that faith and reason are inseparable….

I already spoke in an earlier post about how there are parallels between the way evolution works and the way AI works. Both depend on chance and necessity. But there is something else that computer scientists thinking about AI can learn from evolution. It is the importance of novelty arising…

According to one of my Franciscan brothers, when farmers discovered that artificial fertilizer does more for the harvest than a priest’s blessing of the fields, the crisis of faith characteristic of the modern age began. Seeing a technology’s results changes one’s outlook. But once we understand why artificial fertilizer works…

There’s a parallel between AI and evolution. Both work with chance and necessity. Just as there is no intelligence guiding evolution, there is no intelligence guiding AI. It just charts a space through what is already known while making an occasional random change that creates something new. The “I” in…

What is life? How does it differ from matter as understood by physics? In physics, it does not matter what time it is; its laws are always the same. It does not even matter whether time moves forward or backward. But in life, time matters a great deal more. Life…

What do Franciscans contribute today? This question was foremost on my mind as I attended the Franciscan Studies conference that brought me to Europe this year. We are heirs to a specific tradition in medieval philosophy, but more importantly, we are stewards of a religious tradition attentive to nature. Today,…

I am almost en route to a Franciscan conference in Durham, UK, where my contribution will be a talk about a Franciscan philosophy of nature in a Steinian key. My desire to come up with something new began with my first encounter with Thomism. Was it not obvious, I thought,…

There is a lacuna in the Christian language about nature that requires a lot more attention than it has received. Modern science, by understanding the human body through evolutionary biology, tells us quite clearly that there is no such thing as one perfect human nature that is free of defects….

Something done very beautifully in the philosophy of Edith Stein is the relationship between the individual and the community. It helps navigate conflicts of interest, such as when there are my rights and needs and those of the community, and what must I do when they do not align? There…

There is a famous paper, written by Lynn White in 1967, about human carelessness regarding nature, and it holds up St. Francis as someone who can show us a better way. There is just one problem with this. St. Francis’s approach to nature was entirely intuitive, but is this still…

Everybody knows of Franciscan nature spirituality, but understanding a Franciscan vocation begins by understanding the moment of St. Francis’s conversion. “When I was in sin,” he writes in his spiritual testament, “it seemed very bitter to me to see lepers.” Sin made him recoil from the suffering of lepers, but…

This blog has very intentionally started with a diverse range of topics—artificial intelligence, physics, human rights, Edith Stein, forgiveness, and Franciscan studies. What is holding it together? Where is the common ground for it all? It is the philosophy of Edith Stein, particularly her realism regarding meaning. Being is the…

Academic work typically drills a deep and narrow hole into knowledge space, and this comes with well-known risks. There’s an old quip that a true expert is someone who knows everything about nothing, and it first appeared in print in 1928. The problem is not depth itself but the illusion…

An odd combo: One places the individual human person on a pedestal, and the other ignores it. Yet both are fruits of modernity. The former protects the individual’s autonomy in choosing a path in life, and the latter brackets all meaning from the physical circumstances of this life. This leaves…

There is a remarkable little detail in the life of the philosopher Robert Spaemann, born in Germany in 1927. In 1944, at the age of 17, he wanted to know what had happened to the Jews. He asked German soldiers returning from the Eastern Front, and they told him the…

My first academic degree is an MSc in chemistry, earned after five years of studying chemistry. I acquired considerable expertise in inorganic, organic, and physical chemistry, both practical and theoretical. And then, I just moved on; I never worked in these fields. Instead, I did something completely different and turned…

She was a Discalced Carmelite, now known as St. Teresia Benedicta a Cruce, canonized on account of the extraordinary witness of her faith. She was a Jewish convert to Catholicism, murdered alongside her people in Auschwitz. Today, she is deeply appreciated by many for the spiritual depth of her writings,…

I had a blog before, ten years ago, but there was a problem. Blogs must be short. 500 words seems about right for them. But how can I say something meaningful about the big questions that interest me the most, such as: How is a living being different from matter,…