How can religious traditions help us to encounter God – or, rather, to recognize that we encounter God – in our lives? A crucifix in Tirol triggered me to reflect on that. Nature as a magnificent whole shows traces of your Creator, but if you want to see Him at His greatest, you need to […]
Tag: religion
Deep History of Symbolic Thinking
Deep history, or the evolutionary history of the human species, is an interesting context for theology. Recent research offers insight in the way early humans (50 000 – 30 000 years ago) created a symbolic world in the region north of Australia. Two things strike me as important: It’s just a side note in the […]
Polar Lights and Personal Faith
The turn of the year was a bit of a rough ride. My grandmother died, my last living grandparent, and although I did not have a deep personal relation with her, it felt as if a phase in my life had ended. Unexpectedly, her death has led me into one of the most profound crises of faith […]
Christmas, Creation and Education (Follow up on two Twitter discussions)
The last few days I have witnessed what you could call a parochial version of the war on Christmas, which is raging, according to some at least, in the US. A city council in Flanders decided that it was inappropriate to have a nativity scene on display in the city hall, since that would imply a […]
CFP for “Relation, Vulnerability, Love: Theological Anthropology in the 21st Century”
September 2016 is an important month for the Anthropos Research Group, since we organize a conference that should allow us to bring together different strands of our research. The title, “Relation, Vulnerability, Love: Theological Anthropology in the 21st Century”, expresses both the ambition of the conference and the three concepts that we think are essential to […]
Our Kinship With Nature
There are, I think, two possible interpretations of evolutionary history. The first, which I call the small one, sees evolutionary history as a gradual process of progress. Life started out very simple, but slowly gained in complexity. At one point in time, the human species emerged, with the ability to create culture. This implied, a small interpretation […]
Religions on the Rise?
A recent contribution to the ESSSAT discussion forum on Linkedin offers some interesting numbers on religion. Brian Grim, author of The Price of Freedom Denied (amongst other publications), posted a link to his summary of the Yearbook of International Religious Demography. To offer just one figure out of his list: Religionists account for 88.4% of the world’s population in 2013, up […]
John F. Haught on a Metaphysics of the Future
John Haught’s delightful book “God after Darwin: A Theology of Evolution” offers many ideas. Although I do not fully agree with all of them – I am a bit reluctant about the Whiteheadian threads in some of Haught’s proposals – I think Haught does a tremendous job in showing how theology could be in consonance with […]
Sports And Religion
I wrote a blogpost with a short reflection on what I see as the main dissimilarity between sports and religion, namely the apparent inability of sports today to criticize existing social structures. Sport events seem to have fallen under the spell of that one narrative that, after the fall of ‘grand narratives’, hidden behind the […]
Short quote: Barbour on religious pluralism
If we accept a genuine religious pluralism, we can respect the distinctive character of the historic traditions and learn from one another as well as from nature. Ian G. Barbour, Religion and Science. Historical and Contemporary Issues. A Revised and Expanded Edition of Religion in an Age of Science, Londen, SCM Press Ltd, 1998, p […]
Weekly Gardening 