Workplace spirituality deals with paradoxes. This concept has been taken on board since the late 1980s, but very few human resource managers have realised that workplace spirituality could make an essential contribution to a better understanding of workplace and corporate reality. Increasing numbers of academic papers are being published on this subject but mere remain many grey areas for researchers. The aim of this paper is to use Simone Weil’s philosophy as a reading grid to get an insight into workplace (...) spirituality as a new paradigm of management. Initial studies attempting to apply Weil’s philosophy to management highlight the necessity for all the actors within the organisation to define their job tasks and contents according to their own way of thinking. Our interpretation of Weil’s philosophy also sheds light on the impossibility of dissociating thinking and acting and reminds us that work is done to nourish both the body and the soul. By concentrating on the spirituality of work, we can establish new links between ethics and human resource management. (shrink)

Simone Weil was a sustained and trenchant critic of Marxism from 1930 till her death. In her writings as a philosopher she proposes a rereading of the Marxist analysis of the alienation of work, pointing to the inadequacies and illusions of Marx’s project. Whereas Marx locates the origins of alienation (defined as the human subject’s incapacity to comprehend its work) in the structure of the capitalist market, Weil is convinced that alienation stems from the very nature of the organization of (...) work. The points of convergence between Marx and Weil are essential to an understanding of the philosophy of Simone Weil and to a fuller grasp of its originality and current relevance. (shrink)

Si l’œuvre de Nietzsche présente une familiarité étonnante avec la pensée de Dostoïevski, le rapport du philosophe allemand au romancier russe est plus complexe qu’il n’y paraît. En effet, Nietzsche découvre par un heureux hasard, vers la fin de sa vie, les écrits de Dostoïevski. En quelques mois, il passe d’un enthousiasme absolu à l’aveu d’une déception à l’égard de celui qu’il considère comme un simple décadent chrétien. Comment interpréter ce retournement de Nietzsche vis-à-vis de Dostoïevski? Est-ce simplement un nouvel (...) exemple de la versatilité du philosophe allemand? Ou peut-on y déceler quelque chose de plus profond? Cet article tente de reconstituer la chronologie du rapport de Nietzsche à Dostoïevski et les indices permettant d’éclairer l’apport réel du romancier russe à la philosophie nietzschéenne. (shrink)

There is an extensive body of work that has previously examined the teaching of ethics in business schools whereby it is hoped that the values and behaviours of students might be provoked to show positive and enduring change. Rather than dealing with the content issues of particular business ethics courses per se, this article explores the philosophical foundations and the structural conditions for developing ethical training programs in business schools. It is informed by historical analysis, specifically, an examination of Platonic (...) and Aristotelian philosophies that inspires virtue ethics, and together provides four conditions for consideration: respect for law, dialectics, imitation and deliberation. We outline the necessary structural conditions for implementing these requirements as well as suggesting the necessary pedagogical protocol applicable to all courses. It is argued that reference to our two ancient Greek philosophers provide many valuable and insightful lessons for the implementation of ethical training today including choice of theoretical content and the approach towards learning. Further, the enactment of a pedagogical protocol requires a policy of recruiting and managing business school teachers-instructors that takes into account, and consciously encourages, intellectual, relational and spiritual pedagogical qualities. (shrink)

Nourrie des textes de la tradition philosophique, la pensée de Hannah Arendt vise à tirer les leçons des phénomènes totalitaires pour restaurer une conception de la politique propre à assurer l'existence et la permanence d'un monde à partager et à aimer. Dans ce monde, chaque homme, simplement parce qu'il est homme, serait considéré comme étant porteur d'une valeur inconditionnelle, lui garantissant sa place parmi les siens et une égale dignité. Construire un tel monde implique de rompre avec les travers de (...) la plupart des philosophes, qui depuis Platon se sont révélés résolument hostiles à la politique et à l'action, et se sont réfugiés dans le monde des idées pour se consacrer à la contemplation, laissant ainsi le champ libre aux idéologies mortifères. La plupart des grands philosophes ont ainsi manqué le sens du politique. Et en cela, ils sont en partie responsables et coupables du chaos qui a conduit à l'avènement du nazisme. C'est cette incapacité des philosophes à penser la politique qui poussa Hannah Arendt à refuser avec constance ce qualificatif au profit de celui de théoricienne politique. Le désir insatiable de comprendre les phénomènes, dont elle fut actrice ou spectatrice, amena Hannah Arendt à s'affranchir des catégories et des usages pour proposer une démarche audacieuse et inclassable. La volonté de construire un monde où aucun homme ne serait plus considéré comme superflu la conduisit à emprunter un long chemin semé d'embûches, que cet ouvrage tente de retracer, révélant ainsi une pensée puissante, humaniste et complexe, qui nous permet d'éclairer sous un jour différent notre présent."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

No other scientist may have had a greater impact on modern cosmology than the Belgian physicist, astronomer and priest Georges Lemaître. In 1927 he predicted the expansion of the universe on the basis of the cosmological field equations; and four years later he proposed what he called the primeval-atom hypothesis, the first version of the later big bang universe. In all his work on cosmology the cosmological constant Λ played a significant role. A recognized expert in the theory of general (...) relativity, Lemaître also contributed significantly to the theoretical clarification of local and global singularity problems. Still, when he died in 1968, at a time when the standard big bang model celebrated its first victories, he was largely forgotten or recalled only as a somewhat shadowy figure of the past. This essay reviews in a historical context the scientific work of Lemaître with particular attention to his seminal contributions in the decade between 1925 and 1934. (shrink)

Lucien BOSSY, «La physique d’Einstein» de Georges Lemaître, 1922 (pp. 9-22). Jean-Marc GÉRARD, Georges Lemaître et l’his­toire de notre Univers (pp. 23-55). Jean LADRIÈRE, La portée philo­sophique de l’hypothèse de l’atome primitif (pp. 57-80). Dominique LAMBERT, Pie XII et Georges Lemaître : deux visions distinctes des rapports sciences-foi (pp. 81-111). Marc LEC­LERC, La liberté intellectuelle de l’homme de sciences catho­lique (pp. 113-117). Alfonso PÉREZ DE LABORDA, Cosmologies et dogma­tiques : un problème d’interférence et de représen­tation (pp. 119-142). Jean-François STOFFEL, Mgr (...) Georges Lemaître : bio-biblio­graphie (pp. 145-220). Jean-François STOFFEL, «La physique d’Einstein», texte inédit de Georges Lemaître (pp. 223-360). (shrink)

Recenze knihy:Georges Lemaître, Learning the Physics of Einstein with Georges Lemaître. Before the Big Bang Theory. Jan Govaerts and Jean-François Stoffel (eds.), Springer, 2019, 257 s.

This article focuses on the Omega Point, an essential concept in Teilhard de Chardin’s evolutionary metaphysics. In certain passages about the Omega Point, Teilhard mentions the primeval atom hypothesis, a theory about the beginning of the universe proposed by Georges Lemaître, another contemporary Jesuit priest who was also a scientist. Although Teilhard and Lemaître are essentially evolutionists, besides being Jesuit priests, their evolutionary metaphysics and their philosophies of science are radically divergent, and two important differences are presented here – about (...) the eventual cosmic determinism and about the relationship between scientific knowledge and religious beliefs. This article also shows how Teilhard’s original concept was projected into two cosmological theories in which it reveals an essential transfiguration by losing its initial anthropic and religious matrix – the cosmological anthropic principle, proposed by physicists John Barrow and Frank Tipler, and the Omega Point Theory proposed later by Frank Tipler. (shrink)

In September 1931, a panel discussion was convened at Central Hall Westminsteron the subject of the ‘Evolution of the Universe’, at the centenary meeting of theBritish Association for the Advancement of Science. Center stage was what todo about the evolving universe being younger than the stars, evidently a paradoxin the relativistic study of the evolving universe, at the time. Here, we discusstwo diametrically opposed reactions to the paradox, which were each broadcastat the meeting by Lemaˆıtre and de Sitter, respectively. As (...) we argue, that bothcould be projected to the public as viable reflects an unsettled question at thefoundations of the then-nascent discipline: what is the role for considerationsof scale in relativistic cosmology? (shrink)

We revisit the construction of the gravitational functional renormalization group equation tailored to the Arnowitt–Deser–Misner formulation emphasizing its connection to the covariant formulation. The results obtained from projecting the renormalization group flow onto the Einstein–Hilbert action are reviewed in detail and we provide a novel example illustrating how the formalism may be connected to the causal dynamical triangulations approach to quantum gravity.

Nous proposons ci-après l’étude de la relation entre science et spiritualité chez Georges Lemaître, savant et croyant, un des acteurs principaux de la fondation de la cosmologie moderne. Il s’agit d’explorer la nature et le rôle de cette relation lors d’un épisode important de l’histoire des sciences, plus généralement de l’histoire de la pensée. Le mot spiritualité est ici entendu au sens suivant : l’idée et la recherche du divin, du vrai. Il résulte de la présente approche une appréhension élargie (...) de la prime histoire de la théorie dite du « big bang ». (shrink)

The planninnjg of this Study Week at the Pontifical Academy of Science from September 28 to October 4, 1964, began just two years before when the President, Professor Lemaitre, asked me if 1 would be responsible for a Study Week relating Psychology to what we may call the Neurosciences. 1 accepted this responsibility on the understanding that 1 could have as sistance from two colleagues in the Academy, Professors Heymans and Chagas. Besides participating in the Study Week they gave (...) me much needed assistance and advice in the arduous and, at times, perplexing task that 1 had undertaken, and 1 gratefully acknowledge my indebtedness to them. Though there have been in recent years many symposia concerned with the so-called higher functions of the brain, for example witbh percep tion, learning and conditioning, and with the processing of information in the brain, there has to my knowledge been no symposium specifically with brain functions and consciousness since the memorable treating Laurentian Conference of 1953, which was later published in 1954 as the book, "Brain Mechanisms and Consciousness. (shrink)

What constitutes a scientific discovery? What role do discoveries play in science, its dynamics and social practices? Must every discovery be attributed to an individual discoverer (or a small number of discoverers)? The paper explores these questions by first critically examining extant philosophical explications of scientific discovery—the models of scientific discovery, propounded by Kuhn, McArthur, Hudson, and Schindler. As a simple, natural and powerful alternative, we proffer the “change-driver model”: in a nutshell, it takes discoveries to be cognitive scientific results (...) that have epistemically advanced science. The model overcomes the shortcomings of its precursors, whilst preserving their insights. We demonstrate its intensional and extensional superiority, especially with respect to the link between scientific discoveries and the dynamics of science, as well as the award system of science. Both as an illustration, and as an application to a recent scientific and political controversy, we apply the considered models of discovery to one of the most momentous discoveries of science: the expansion of the universe. We oppose the 2018 proposal of the International Astronomers’ Union as too simplistic vis-`a-vis the historical complexity of the episode. The change- driver model yields a more nuanced and circumspect verdict: (i) The redshift-distance relation shouldn’t be named the “Hubble-Lemaître Law”, but “Slipher-Lundmark-Hubble-Humason Law”; (ii) Its interpretation in terms of an expanding universe, however, Lemaître ought to be given credit for; but (iii) The establishment of the expansion of the universe, as an evidentially sufficiently warranted result, is a communal achievement, emerging in the 1950s or 1960s. (shrink)

The singularity theorems of the 1960s showed that Lemaître’s initial symmetry assumptions were not essential for deriving a big-bang origin for a vast multitude of relativistic universe models. Yet the actual universe accords remarkably closely with models of Lemaître’s type. This is a mystery closely related to the form taken by the 2nd law of thermodynamics and is not explained by currently conventional inflationary cosmology. Conformal cyclic cosmology provides another perspective on these issues, one consequence being the necessary initial presence (...) of a dominant scalar material that interacts only gravitationally, but which must ultimately slowly decay away in a novel but perhaps detectable way. According to CCC, our current universe picture provides but one aeon of an unending succession of expanding aeons each having an initial big bang which is the conformal continuation of the remote exponential expansion of its previous aeon. The observational status of CCC is briefly discussed. (shrink)

We review the observational foundations of the ΛCDMΛCDM model, considered by most cosmologists as the standard model of cosmology. The Cosmological Principle, a key assumption of the model is shown to be verified with increasing accuracy. The fact that the Universe seems to have expanded from a hot and dense past is supported by many independent probes . The explosion of detailed observations in the last few decades has allowed for precise measurements of the cosmological parameters within Friedman–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker cosmologies leading (...) to the ΛCDMΛCDM model: an apparently flat Universe, dominated by a cosmological constant, whose matter component is dominantly dark. We describe and discuss the various observational probes that led to this conclusion and conclude that the ΛCDMΛCDM model, although leaving a number of open questions concerning the deep nature of the constituents of the Universe, provides the best theoretical framework to explain the observations. (shrink)

The twentieth century began with the deconstruction of the image, as it is ending with the effort to restore it. Cubism, dada, and abstract expressionism took apart what, in their various ways, pop art, magic realism, and neoexpressionism have tried to put back together. Tonality in music and narrative in literature have undergone similar change.1 What has been at stake in each case has been the redefinition of a center, a normative or ordering principle as such. Yeats intuited this general (...) phenomenon in his famous observation that “the center cannot hold,” and though whether one applauds or, with Yeats, condemns the result, it is undeniable that the crisis of contemporary culture has been in large part experienced as a deprivation of norms.This sense of deprivation has been most apparent in the plastic arts. The fashioning of images has been one of the primary impulses of human art. It has been the basis of most systems of visual representation and constitutes the earliest record we have off art itself. Its loss or abandonment has been in good part responsible for the bewilderment and hostility much of the general public continues to express toward modern art.The experience of this loss, however, has not been confined to the public alone. For many artists, the sense of modern art’s expressive potential has been tempered by an anxiety about its ultimate direction.2 For these artists, the image had not been transcended but rather rendered inaccessible, and implicitly or explicitly they sought its restoration. At the same time, they were keenly aware that there could be no return to exhausted modes of representation, no looking back except as parody or quotation.3 1. Among the studies comparing changes across the arts in the early twentieth century are Georges Edouard Lemaître, From Cubism to Surrealism in French Literature , and Bram Dijkstra, The Hieroglyphics of a New Speech: Cubism, Stieglitz, and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams . More recently, visualization in cubist art and relativity theory has been compared in Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art . For a general overview, see Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 . Marxist critics, notably Walter Benjamin, have long insisted on the relationship between modernism in the arts and the crisis of the traditional order.2. This is clearly visible in the work and writing of pioneers such as Kandinsky and Klee or, to take a later case, Adolph Gottlieb. The correspondence between Kandinsky and Schönberg is illuminating as well.3. Much of the neoimagistic art of the past twenty-five years falls into these categories, and thus signals a prolongation rather than a resolution of the crisis. Pop art was clearly an art of parody, while work of an artist such as Malcolm Morley might almost be taken as an illustration of Benjamin’s thesis about the work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction. His “imitations,” like those of Robert Lowell in verse, betray a deep anxiety about mastery and tradition. Much the same can be said for such musical compositions as Lukas Foss’ “Baroque Variations” and “Phorion” or Luciano Berio’s “Sinfonia,” to name but a random few among many. Robert Zaller is professor of history and head of the department of history and politics at Drexel University. He was formerly on the faculties of Queens College , the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Miami. His books include The Parliament of 1621: A Study in Constitutional Conflict and The Cliffs of Solitude: A Reading of Robinson Jeffers. (shrink)

Educators advocate that science education can help the development of more responsible worldviews when students learn not only scientific concepts, but also about science, or “nature of science”. Cosmology can help the formation of worldviews because this topic is embedded in socio-cultural and religious issues. Indeed, during the Cold War period, the cosmological controversy between Big Bang and Steady State theory was tied up with political and religious arguments. The present paper discusses a didactic sequence developed for and applied in (...) a pre-service science teacher-training course on history of science. After studying the historical case, pre-service science teachers discussed how to deal with possible conflicts between scientific views and students’ personal worldviews related to religion. The course focused on the study of primary and secondary sources about cosmology and religion written by cosmologists such as Georges Lemaître, Fred Hoyle and the Pope Pius XII. We used didactic strategies such as short seminars given by groups of pre-service teachers, videos, computer simulations, role-play, debates and preparation of written essays. Along the course, most pre-service teachers emphasized differences between science and religion and pointed out that they do not feel prepared to conduct classroom discussions about this topic. Discussing the relations between science and religion using the history of cosmology turned into an effective way to teach not only science concepts but also to stimulate reflections about nature of science. This topic may contribute to increasing students’ critical stance on controversial issues, without the need to explicitly defend certain positions, or disapprove students’ cultural traditions. Moreover, pre-service teachers practiced didactic strategies to deal with this kind of unusual content. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 279—285. Concerning its Transitive Nature, the Conversion of Native Americans of Spanish Colonial California, Indoctrinated Catholicism, & the Creation There’s no direct archaeological evidence that Jesus ever existed. 1 I memorized the Act of Contrition. I don’t remember it now, except the beginning: Forgive me Father for I have sinned . . . This was in preparation for the Sacrament of Holy Reconciliation, where in a confessional I confessed my sins to Father Scott, who looked like Jesus, (...) at least in Western cultural representations of Jesus since the middle ages, and if Jesus put on a few pounds. Father Scott was long-haired, redheaded, bearded, chubby, and tall. When he left church with the procession of altar servers and Eucharistic ministers, yelling, “Sing a Good Song Unto the Lord,” he smiled, hands folded, and he gazed over his parishioners, and bounced along. For four months every year he lived among the Crow Nation in Montana, where towards the end of his tenure at Our Lady of Refuge, they adopted him as an honorary member of their tribe. * This is the prayer we chanted, holding hands, every night before dinner: Bless us oh Lord, for these our gifts, which we are about to receive, our bounty through Christ, our Lord, Amen. Then we all said, God bless the cook! When we were with my grandparents, Grandpa said, God bless Chicky, and Holly, and Harvey, and Boots—all the dead dogs. * My sister tells me that she sits next to a handsome man on a flight across the country. After chitchat, she withdraws her book. She’s reading Kevin Sampsell’s A Common Pornography . After a few moments, the handsome man also reads from his book—his leather-bound Bible. Sister thinks, Oh, Jesus—too bad. She falls asleep. Later, settled in Nashville, she opens her volume and out falls a Jesus-covered card that reads, You can still find God and Salvation! Because that handsome God-fearing young man saw that word— pornography . * I suppose Father Jim’s dark hair, beard, and glasses made me think doctoral-ly of him. He called while I was in the midst of a breakup, after I’d twice attempted suicide, and my mother was desperate for help. She somehow found and phoned him. And Jim, now years out of Our Lady of Refuge’s parish, twenty years since my baptism, years even since he’d left the priesthood and the Catholic faith, still made the effort to bring me back into the fold. He said, “Have you seen a priest?” I did not respond, as I was more shocked to hear his voice than anything, so I said, “How are you, Father Jim? Sorry, I guess I shouldn’t call you ‘Father.’” And I said, “Why did you leave the priesthood? Do you have a girlfriend?” He said that I should call him just “Jim.” He said, “Do you need someone to talk to?” I said, “Not really.” He said, “Call your mother; she’s worried about you.” That was the last time I talked to Father Jim. * Mother let me know just how disappointed Jesus was. I cried and cried, and said I was sorry. Into my hands she placed my missal, ordered forty Rosaries. She said next Saturday I would go to confession. I hated confession. Who wouldn’t? * I realize, of course, that this page is a kind of confessional. * The Kumeyaay, Ipai, Tipai, Chumash, Esselen, Rumsen—all Native Americans of Alta California—shared similarities in their religions. Southern Californian tribes made use of Datura, or jimpson weed, a hallucinogen, for religious rituals. In the creation, God made brother sky and sister earth. Brother and sister mated, and sister gave birth to all things on Earth, including people, but it was difficult to distinguish people from all other aspects of Earth because everything was alive: granite and obsidian, the Pacific and its waves, the San Diego and Los Angeles Rivers. Wiyot—a hero—was very powerful, born from lightning, the son of the Creator and a virgin. When Wiyot thought that human women’s legs were more beautiful than Frog’s, Frog became jealous and poisoned Wiyot. The dying Wiyot went to all the people’s villages, and he distributed his power among them. He said, “When I die, I should be cremated.” The people built the fire and funeral pyre. When the fire was ready, and the people about to place Wiyot’s body upon it, Coyote came and snatched away Wiyot’s heart. * My friend Nick told me once how he ate some jimpson weed and that he hallucinated for three days. His family took a road trip and, while driving over the Sierra Nevada mountains, he kept seeing dinosaurs roaming the open meadows and charging down snowy slopes. So it’s no wonder that Native Americans who ingested this plant would have developed religion. * Walking Castroville’s streets after school I got into fights but mostly watched other boys scrabbling on the asphalt. I went to Burger King for Whoppers. Me and my friends cussed. Antonio admonished me when I said, “damn,” while strutting a sidewalk alongside the church. He said, “Jaime”—pronounced Hi-May, which was what all the Mexicans called me—“you’re crazy, eh. Don’t cuss at the church.” He meant while at church, as in, within its vicinity. I said, “We’re not in church.” Once we’d crossed the street, Tony said, “Damn dude, you’re fuckin crazy!” * Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra raised the Eucharistic goblet to his lips, and candlelight danced on the blood’s tiny waves. Incense clouded the church so completely that some of the Pame natives grew nauseous. So, too, felt Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra later that night, as he bent over a ceramic bowl and vomited blood, not only the Lord’s, but his own, for poison had laced the sacred vessel into which he poured the sacrament. The physician tending to the sick prelate urged him to take the remedy he’d prepared. But Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra refused, said that he would pray, for he had never taken any medicine in his life, and he never would. * The Chumash of El Valle de Los Osos called themselves the Stishni, separating themselves from Chumash of other regions, those varying tribes of the central California coast that spoke mutually unintelligible dialects of their Hokan language. This made learning their languages impossible for the Spanish friars, to say nothing of translating the Doctrina. Thus the priests baptized few natives, despite the help that the tribes offered the fledgling settlements in the form of meat and acorn meal, which the Spaniards found repugnant. Some from these cultures, feeling threatened by the newcomers, shot flaming arrows into the thatched roofs of the mission structures. And why wouldn’t they feel threatened when priests chastised them for performing, for example, their Coyote Dance, wherein a man donning a coyote-skin-and-skull costume dances while a singer sings his tale, which laments the human feces strewn imaginatively about the Earth? Coyote, meantime, tries to get an onlooker to lick his genitals, and finally engages in public sexual intercourse with a female tribe member or two, then ends the dance by defecating. Though the Franciscans called such forbidden acts devilry , the Chumash maintained their Datura cult religion, along with the enforced Christianity. For the Chumash, the Earth was made of two enormous snakes that caused earthquakes when they slithered past one another—a vast reptilian tectonics. In the 20th century, long after Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra and his cohorts had died, when asked by an anthropologist about religious contradictions, conflating the Datura and Christian cults, a Chumash man replied, incredulous: “But these are two different religions.” * When Portolá ordered that if by March 19th, the feast day of St. Joseph, the San Antonio had not arrived in San Diego Bay to relieve them, the Sacred Expedition to Nueva California would be abandoned, Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra prayed a novena for San José’s intercession. And lo, a lookout sighted the San Antonio ’s sails—what seemed to the priest a miracle—that very Saint’s feast day. Europeans would stay in California, and Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra would continue to reap a great harvest of souls for the Lord. By the end of mission secularization in 1836—sixty-six years after the San Antonio rescued the Spaniards—Native American populations in California had declined by seventy-three percent. * When Peter the Aleut would not renounce his Eastern Orthodox faith the padre of San Francisco had a toe severed from each foot with each refusal, totaling ten. The native Ohlones employed in this gruesome task—their obsidian chiseled knives tearing through skin and grinding bone—continued as per their orders, and cut off also each of Peter’s fingers (equals a total of twenty refusals). They quartered the martyr, spilled his bowels, as if from bear attack, attack by a bear in the shape of a Catholic. * Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra absolutely believed that the slow rate of conversion for the native people was due to the influence of the Devil, who had been outraged by the coming of the Catholics to California, this region that he had long held in his dominion. * In his reception speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, John Steinbeck said, “Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope. So that today, St. John the Apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man—and the Word is with Men.” * In 1602, when Sebastián Vizcaíno and his friars sang mass on Catalina Island, as many as a hundred Pimungans witnessed the rite, asking by signs what it was about. According to Vizcaíno’s records, the Californians marveled not a little at the idea of Heaven and at the image of Jesus crucified. * Vizcaíno was brought to a prairie on Santa Catalina Island where the Pimungans worshipped their sun god. Upon the prairie they had placed an icon, a headless figure with horns protruding from the body, a figure that Vizcaíno predictably described as a demon. The Pimungans urged Vizcaíno not to approach the image of their deity, but he ignored them. He placed his crucifix against the wooden figurine and prayed the Our Father. Vizcaíno told the natives that his prayer was from Heaven, and that their god was the Devil. Vizcaíno held out his crucifix, encouraging the Pimungans to touch it and receive Jesus. He pointed at the sky and indicated Heaven. The Pimungans worshipped a sun deity, so they were impressed with this white man and his description of his god, for their gods seemed to be one and the same. It’s no wonder then that Vizcaíno’s diary reports the natives being pleased with this exchange. “Surely,” the diary says, “they will be converted to our Holy Faith.” * The Miwok women wailed and scratched at their faces when their men consorted with Sir Francis Drake and the other Englishmen who had landed on California’s coast in the summer of 1579. “The blood streaming downe along their brests, besides despoiling the upper parts of their bodies of those single coverings . . .they would with furie cast themselves upon the ground . . . on hard stones, knobby hillocks, stocks of wood, and pricking bushes.” Drake and his men fell themselves to their knees in prayer, their eyes Heavenward, so that the natives might see they prayed to God and they too might worship God then their eyes that had been so blinded by the deceiver might be opened. * Father Fray Antonio de la Ascención—Carmelite friar in Vizcaíno’s party—writes that the Indians of California can “easily and with very little labor be taught our Holy Catholic faith, and that they would receive it well and lovingly.” He calls for two hundred older and honorable soldiers to ensure brotherhood during the conquest, so that peace and love—the best tools to pacify pagans—should reign. The religious, the friar says, should likewise be wise and loving to easily quell animosities between Spaniards and the heathen, and therefore avoid war. The Spaniards should bring with them trinkets—beads, mirrors, knives—to distribute amongst the gentiles, so that they might come to love the Christians, and see “that they are coming to their lands to give them that of which they bring, and not to take away the Indians’ possessions, and may understand that they are seeking the good of their souls.” No women are to accompany the conquest, says Father Fray Antonio, “to avoid offenses to God.” * In 1955 Wallace Stevens admitted himself to St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut. There, it’s rumored he converted to Catholicism before dying of stomach cancer, exclaiming to his priest after the baptism, “Now I am in the fold.” Stevens’s late-career poems seem less cynical, more in awe of being and death (read “Metaphor as Degeneration” from The Auroras of Autumn ). He could have chosen from at least three secular hospitals in Hartford at the time. * I was reading Stevens’s Collected Poems when I joined eHarmony and listed that as my “currently reading” book among the “more than twelve” books a year that I would read. I fell in love with my wife when she said, “Are you sending your work out to literary journals?” Prior to this, the first girl I talked to on the phone, when I explained my doctoral exams, said, “So, you’re like, reading Stephen King and stuff?” When I said not exactly she responded defensively: “He must be doing something right, since he makes all that money.” * Mom walked me, my brother, and sister, through the Stations of the Cross. We did this on Ash Wednesdays, or whenever she thought we needed extra God after church. It might’ve happened before church, though that’s unlikely because we were always late. Anyway, it’s easiest to walk the Stations of the Cross when there’s no one else around. To walk the actual Stations means one goes to Jerusalem and walks the Via Dolorosa to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. So the Stations elsewhere—usually paintings, or low-relief sculptures upon church walls—serve as a kind of virtual Dolorosa. Mom held our hands and started from the rear of Our Lady of Refuge: the First Station. Mom said we should say a prayer at each Station and to think of all the pain Jesus went through so that we could go to Heaven. It was hard to keep thinking about that one thing for so long. My mind went to that Saturday’s little league game, to the donut and chocolate milk (our after-church reward from Castroville Bakery), and as I grew older I thought about girls. When you’re thirteen you can’t not think about the girl’s butt in the pew in front of yours as she kneels and stands to pray throughout mass. * It grew increasingly juvenile to lie awake at night daring myself to utter a simple sentence. Even if I said I didn’t believe in God, wouldn’t He know the truth? He was omniscient, like a narrator. Even the idea of Him as a him ceased making sense. Not only did this come with a budding realization of my paternalistic culture, but due to the simple question of why? If God was everything, everywhere, all knowing, then why would he be a man? There’s that question: If God is a man then God must have a penis, and if so, what for? * The Catholic Church incorporates some modern scientific research into its dogma concerning the formation of the Universe, Solar System, and Earth, as well as evolution. According to Catholic doctrine, in approximately the fifth millennia BCE, humans began to worship the one true God. Those humans were Adam and Eve, though the Church says humans had been around for thousands of years prior to Adam and Eve. The Church claims to be infallible. Every time the Church changes its doctrine it remains infallible. * One Catholic writer, Tom Meagher, writes that “Modernism[—]the idea that we come to our beliefs individually through emotional or personal experiences[—]has crept into our Catholic schools.” * Catholics believe that evil spirits, given power through Original Sin, can imbue ordinary inanimate objects of everyday use. Thus, such objects should be blessed in order to induce in them the desire to serve the good. Such objects are not limited to, but include, “new ships and boats, railways and trains, bridges, fountains, wells, cornmills, limekilns, smelting furnaces, telegrams, steam engines, and machines for providing electricity.” * In The Sound of Music Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer sing together: “Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could...” * To explain competing theories on the very early universe, and pre-verse would be another book. What was the inflaton? Did (mem)branes collide, initiating the Big Bang, as opposed to Lemaître’s primordial atom, a singularity? Without a unified theory there’s gravity hanging out there, fucking everything up. We cannot make sense of the mechanics of the Planck Epoch—0-10-34 seconds into the Universe’s creation—named for Max Planck, who stumbled into the discovery of quantum mechanics in the early twentieth century. * My students often ask if I believe in God, since I espouse evolution, the Big Bang, Science, reject a strictly biblical or creationist theory of the Universe. I tell them that yes, I believe in God, though not the God that they imagine one must believe in. * When questioned regarding the rumor that, before his death, founder of quantum mechanics Max Planck had converted to Catholicism, he replied that he did not believe “in a personal God, let alone a Christian God.” * Physicist and Catholic priest George Lemaître, who formulated the theory and wrote the 1946 book The Primeval Atom Hypothesis , was made a household name by then-detractor Fred Hoyle, who pejoratively referred to the idea as a “Big Bang.” * Suicide is a mortal sin. To end one’s own life one must have despair, which is to lose hope, which is to lose faith, and to disbelieve in God. * Archaeology has uncovered graffiti in all of California’s missions—Indian pictographs inscribed into the adobe, covered with layers of whitewash. Native deities and depictions of cultural practices show that tribespeople never fully gave up their native traditions even after baptism and coming to the missions. There was something inside Native Californians that would never die. (shrink)

The uncertainty on measurements, given by the Heisenberg principle, is a quantum concept usually not taken into account in General Relativity. From a cosmological point of view, several authors wonder how such a principle can be reconciled with the Big Bang singularity, but, generally, not whether it may affect the reliability of cosmological measurements. In this letter, we express the Compton mass as a function of the cosmological redshift. The cosmological application of the indetermination principle unveils the differences of the (...) Hubble-Lemaître constant value, $$H_0$$, as measured from the Cepheids estimates and from the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation constraints. In conclusion, the $$H_0$$ tension could be related to the effect of indetermination derived in comparing a kinematic with a dynamic measurement. (shrink)

Cosmology as Weltanschauung is as old as the world. Cosmology as a physical discipline, however, is a child of this century, born in 1917, when Albert Einstein and Willem de Sitter first applied the theory of general relativity to the space-time of the entire universe. When did the child come of age and become a fully-fledged science? A popular myth shared by many practitioners holds that this did not happen until 1965, when the discovery of the 2.7K cosmic microwave background (...) radiation validated the concept of the hot big bang. Earlier accomplishments culminating in the 1965 event include the derivation of evolving relativistic models by Alexander Friedmann and George Lemaître, Edwin Hubble’s discovery of the redshift-magnitude relationship and George Gamow’s theory of the primordial nucleosynthesis containing the prediction of the microwave background left from the hot and dense past of the universe. This linear development is thrown into sharper relief in textbooks, by referring to an inarticulate.. (shrink)

The subject matter of the article is a standard cosmological model of the Universe. Contemporary opinion regarding origin, structure, and evolution of the Universe is of great interest. The answer to the question of the Universe origin is given by the Big Bang Theory. Is it possible to be sure in this theory correctness, which persuading of the Universe origination from the singularity fluctuation, when the World had appeared from nowhere, that is from abstract nothingness, further accelerated expansion of the (...) Universe following the Big Bang, and its development up to present with inexplicable source of energy for that. However, in the extreme end of the meta-universe the speed of stellar formations runaway is about the light velocity. Further, there is a new problem, the finiteness of the Universe. There are two counter-opinions, if the expanding Universe is finite or infinite. A very important question arises here, the question regarding isolatedness of the Universe as a system. The problem of the Universe heat death is closely connected with it. For this reason it is the time to discuss the Universe entropy. There is a short description of notions and problems with reference to this branch of knowledge, as well as of Doppler and Ritz effects alongside with Habble Law. The authors’ detailed interpretation of an entropy is also suggested. The analysis of the existing model is followed by the idea of the authors about the Universe organization. The style of the article is popular-science. In the first part of the article the existing concept of the Expanding Universe Theory and the dynamical Friedmann-Lemaitre models are described; it deals with the existing concept of the Big Bang Theory as well as the dark energy and the dark matter notions. In the second part the author gives detailed interpretation of an entropy. In the last part the problem of theoretical basis and fact nonconformity within the Expanding Universe Model Theory and the authors’ idea about the Universe organization are considered. (shrink)