True Confessions

In the Washington Post Sunday Magazine on March 25, 2007, Jeanne Marie Laskas had another great column, this one titled True Confessions.
Since my daughter Colleen just made her first confession and is now preparing for First Communion, we enjoyed it greatly.
(Of course, those of you who have no experience going to confession may find it dumb, not humorous.)

Helping Colleen prepare for these sacraments has been very educational: I've learned some important things I never knew, remembered some things I forgot, and increased my understanding of these important sacraments.
We believe that they are important ways to receive God's grace, ways that he communicates with us and becomes present to us.
It is mysterious, I know, but no less wonderful for being mysterious.
Those interested in learning more can see the relevant entries in the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation (otherwise known as Confession) and Sacrament of the Eucharist (otherwise known as Communion).

I'm in the middle of reading the latest issue of First Things and will certainly have a post about the article on faith and science.
Stay tuned.

Something Completely Different

After reading some of my previous posts it has become clear to me (finally, any readers might say) that this blog is a bit too formal. I suppose that it comes from my line of work, where I spend a lot of time writing scholarly papers and editing graduate theses that are supposed to sound professional.

Perhaps, in future posts, I will be able to write more informally, as if I were writing a letter to my family and close friends instead of writing an encyclopedia article or book review.

So you may notice a change in tone, a slightly different choice of topics occasionally. I expect it will still be heavy on science and philosophy and religion, since I spend most of my time thinking about these things. There may be more about decision-making.

The Ethical Mind

The March 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review has an edited conversation with Howard Gardner, a professor of psychology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Professor Gardner's research on how professionals work is now a book, Five Minds for the Future.

Gardner described five minds (or sets of skills):

1. The disciplined mind is how one gains expertise.

2. The synthesizing mind combines information from a variety of sources.

3. The creating mind looks for new ideas and discovers new things.

4. The respectful mind tries to understand others.

5. The ethical mind considers how one's actions affect the world.

A whistle-blower is using his ethical mind by considering the impact of his company's actions on its customers or the environment.
An ethical mind begins at home, as a child learns his parents' values.
Seeing others behave badly undermines the ethical mind, while seeing others do the right things strengthens it.

Gardner points out that conflicts betwen stakeholders make ethical behavior difficult.
He states that journalists face difficulties because they desire to report objectively on important events, but the public desires sensationalism, and the publisher wants advertising dollars and a paper that avoids offending advertisers.

The Victory of Reason

Rodney Stark's The Victory of Reason is subtitled: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success. Stark argues that, because Christianity embraced reason (unlike other religions), it enabled Europeans to establish, well, freedom, capitalism, and Western success.

The book shows that the supposed conflict between Christianity and capitalism (just like the mythical conflict between Christianity and science) is simply not true. Capitalism developed in medieval Catholic monasteries who sought economic security by enhancing productivity, managing their properties as enterprises, specializing in products such as wine or grain or cattle, and trading with others.

Capitalism grew in northern Italian cities with a fair degree of freedom. (However, it failed to appear in southern Italy, which had no freedom in the Norman kingdom.) Then it moved into the Low Countries and England. But it passed by Spain and France, which were ruled by tyrants that stifled innovation and overtaxed their people.

Especially interesting is Stark's description of technical innovations that occurred long before the First Industrial Revolution. For instance, water-powered mills in England, windmills to pump water out of land in the Netherlands, chimneys, eyeglasses, and clocks were invented after the fall of Rome, in what folks ignorantly call the "Dark Ages," a time when Europe's inventions were more advanced than any elsewhere in the world.

Is nature enough?

The February 2007 issue of First Things (www.firstthings.com) has a review of Is Nature Enough? Truth and Meaning in the Age of Science by John F. Haught.
(The review is by Michael Liccione.)
According to the review, Haught believes that theologians should not fear the theory of evolution because evolutionary biology is limited to observing facts and supplying theories based on those observations.
The idea that only what can be shown scientifically can be known at all is scientism, a specific epistemology; that is, it is a philosophical position, not a scientific one.

Haught uses the idea of a "layered explanation" to explain the limited domain of scientific knowledge. Science can explain what is happening and how it is happening, but it cannot explain why it happens. The theological answer to why does the cosmos exist is not a substitute for a scientific answer but exists on a higher layer.
This is related to the idea of causation (or causality), mentioned in the previous post.