Coming to Christ is an intriguing journey

From left: Kent Shi, Loren Brown, Katie Cabrera,Verena Kaynig-Fittkau, and Kyle Richard

They say that God writes straight with crooked lines. How true that is can be seen in the life stories of five  people who joined or rejoined the Catholic Church at Easter. All have links to Harvard University.

Twenty-five-year-old Kent Shi's path was typical of many young people in that he was agnostic to belief in God for a good part of his life. 

However, there was movement toward trying to understand the depths of his being so that as a graduate student in Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government  he accepted Christ and started attending services at a Presbyterian church.

Then during the summer of 2021, a crucifix outside St. Paul’s Church near the Harvard campus that Shi says he “must have passed multiple times a week for months and never noticed” caught his eye, and deeply moved him.

Soon after a friend invited him to attend eucharistic adoration even though he “didn’t know what adoration meant”. But kneeling in the front few pews he started asking questions about the host displayed in a monstrance on the altar. Catholics hold that, taking Jesus at his word, the consecrated host is his body and blood in the form of bread.

This is a key point of Shi's story:

For many non-Catholics considering entering the Catholic Church, the Real Presence can be a major obstacle.

Not Shi. He says that once the Eucharist was explained to him that day, he instantly believed.

Shi began attending Mass and decided to take part in the program that prepares non-Catholics for baptism or, if they are already Christians, for full participation in the life of the Church.

The wish to be fully involved in a way of life that brings us close to God seemed to be driving Katie Cabrera, a 19-year-old Harvard freshman, on a path that led her to the Church.

She grew up in Massachusetts, was baptized as a child and comes from a family of  immigrants from the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean. Her father had little education, but during a difficult life maintained Catholic traditions in the home.

Growing up, however, Cabrera attended a non-denominational church with her mother. Because she felt the church’s teachings lacked an emphasis on God’s love and mercy, Cabrera eventually left.   

“Even though I Ieft, I always knew that I believed in God,” Cabrera said. “So, I was at a place where I felt kind of lost, because I always had that faith, but I didn't know what to do with it.”

One day she accepted a friend’s invitation to attend an ice-cream social at the Harvard Catholic Center — “and that was like, sort of, how it all started”.

“There was a void that existed in my heart,” she said. “As soon as Father Patrick [Fiorillo] started teaching about marriage and family, theology of the body, and the sacraments, I was like, ‘This is what I've been looking for my whole life.’”  

[...] She felt a “calling” that she “really wanted to officially become Catholic” after many difficult years without a faith community. 

Coming to understand Catholic doctrine was not an obstacle because the priests available at Harvard were experienced at explaining the faith.

For the next Harvard student God used poetry and art to open the door to a closer relationship with him. For Loren Brown, 25, being at Harvard was "providential" in the way God worked in his life. Here is the account of his journey: 

[H]e comes from a “lapsed” Catholic family and wasn’t baptized. He didn’t think much about the faith until the spring semester of his freshman year, when Catholic friends of his “began to question my lack of commitment to faith”.

Later, when students were sent home to take classes virtually due to the pandemic, he had time to reflect and began to read some of the books they’d recommended to him. The poetry of T.S. Eliot and the Confessions by St. Augustine, in particular, “pulled me towards the faith,” he said.

Brown describes his conversion as a “gradual process” which backed him into a “logical corner.” But a chance meeting with a priest was also key.

One day in the summer of 2021 while walking back to his dormitory he encountered a man wearing a priestly collar outside St. Paul’s Church on busy Mount Auburn Street.

It was Father George Salzmann, graduate chaplain of the Harvard Catholic Center.

“He asked me how I was doing, what I was studying, and we immediately found a common interest in St. Augustine.”  

Brown remembers the gregarious priest telling him: “You know, there's this great window of St. Augustine inside St. Paul's [Church] and you should come see it." Salzmann wound up giving Brown a brief tour of the church.

The next week, Brown found himself sitting in a pew for his first Sunday Mass at St. Paul’s. 

Brown says he now realizes that coming to Harvard was about more than majoring in education.

“What I wanted out of Harvard has completely changed. Instead of an education that prepares me for a job or a career, I want one that forms me as a moral being and a human.” 

Verena Kaynig-Fittkau, 42, is a German immigrant who came to the U.S. 10 years ago with her husband to do her post-doctoral research in biomedical image processing at Harvard's engineering school.

The couple settled in Cambridge, where they had their first child. Two subsequent pregnancies ended in miscarriage, however. That second loss was overwhelming for Kaynig-Fittkau, who says she was raised as a “secular Lutheran” without any strong faith.

“It broke me and a lot of my pride and made me realize that I can’t do things by myself,” she said

She found herself on her knees one Thanksgiving, pleading with God. “I can’t do this alone,” she said. “Please help me.” 

She says God answered her prayer by introducing her to another mother, who she met at a playground. She was a Christian who later invited Kaynig-Fittkau to attend services at a Presbyterian church.

In that church, there was a lot of emphasis on “faith alone”,she said. But Kaynig-Fittkau, who now works for Adobe and is the mother of two girls, kept questioning if her faith was deep enough. 

Then one day she stumbled upon a YouTube video titled "The hour that will change your life," in which Father Mike Schmitz, a Catholic priest known for his Bible in a Year podcast, speaks about the Eucharist.

She began watching similar videos by other Catholic speakers, including  Bishop Robert Barron, Matt Fradd, and Scott Hahn, each of whom drew her closer and closer to the Catholic faith. Her journey continued in this way:

Familiar with St. Paul’s from her days as a Harvard researcher and lecturer, she decided to attend Mass there one day, and made an appointment before she left to meet with Father Fiorillo.

When they met, Fiorillo answered all of her questions from what she calls “a list of Protestant problems with Catholicism”.

 Kaynig-Fittkau went on to join the program for those seeking to know more about the traditions and practices that Catholics have received. 

Recalling her first experience attending eucharistic adoration, she said it felt “utterly weird” to be worshiping what she describes as “this golden sun”.

A conversation with a local Jesuit priest helped her better understand the Eucharist, however. Now she finds that spending time before the Blessed Sacrament is “amazing.”

The journey to the Catholic Church for Kyle Richard, 37,was fostered by an attachment to the rosary, the prayer to Mary, Jesus' mother, asking that she intercede for us now with all our needs, and at the hour of our death, when we have to give her son an account of our life. 

Richard works in a technology startup company in downtown Boston. His journey is described here:

Although he grew up in a culturally Catholic hub in Louisiana, his parents left the Catholic faith and joined a Full Gospel church. Richard said he found the church “intimidating”, which led him eventually to leave Christianity altogether.

When Richard was in his mid-twenties, his father battled pancreatic cancer. Before he died, he expressed a wish to rejoin the Catholic Church. He never did confess his sins to a priest or receive the Anointing of the Sick, Richard recalls sadly. But years later, his non-believing son would remember his father's yearning to return to the Church.

“I kind of filed that away for a while, but I never really let it go,” he said.

Initially, Richard moved even farther away from the Church. He said he became an atheist who thought that Christianity was simply “something that people used to just soothe themselves”.

Years later, while going through a divorce, he had a change of heart.

Feeling he ought to give Christianity “a fair shot”, he began saying the rosary in hopes of settling his anxiety. The prayer brought him peace, and became a gateway to the Catholic faith.

Before long, he was reading the Bible on the Vatican’s website, downloading prayer apps, and meditating on scripture.

A Google search brought him to St. Paul’s program for those learning about the Church, something that he feels was a continuation of his father's desire on his deathbed more than a decade ago.

Father Fiorillo said that people often assumed that those who seek to come close to Christ through the Harvard Catholic Center are intellectual powerhouses and therefore have an intellectual kind of belief:

“That is definitely true of some people. But I would say the majority are not here because of intellectually thinking their way into the faith. Some are. But the majority are just kind of ordinary life circumstances, just seeking, questioning the ways of the world, and just trying to get in touch with this desire on their heart for something more."

Several times in scripture God points out to us that his care continues even when we are not attentive: "Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear" (Isaiah 59:1); or, "The Lord answered Moses, 'Is the Lord’s arm too short? Now you will see whether or not what I say will come true for you' ” (Numbers 11:23). 

All the best for your enchanted journey in life toward a deeper relationship with God! 

Ω With thanks to CNA writers Joe Bukuras and Shannon Mullen 

Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.

Labour Day message to neglected workers

Workers need to stand up for themselves. Photo by Yan Krukov

In Vietnam, where I live, International Labour Day is being marked today Monday May 2, providing a public holiday.  Attention is given to what people need to ensure that work is not degrading, but a positive experience for themselves, for their family, and for the ethos of the whole society.

In Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh declared in 1945 that May 1 should be a public holiday, but the Japanese and French powers had other ideas. However, even with Ho Chi Minh's party in control after 1954 the struggle for improved working conditions would have to continue. 

The labour "shortage" that has created headaches for employers since the end of the Covid-19 lockdown tells us that working people are not happy with their situation.

A vision of what is possible by way of new practices, a willingness to regain what has been lost to employer power in the way of  union bargaining and overtime pay, for example, and a society-wide acceptance that the family must have more protections through legislation to allow parents, especially women, to have flexible arrangements in order to meet the needs of their children—these are essential for the well-being of all.

To regain what has been lost to working people means restoring provisions such as contract negotiations only through a union, provisions lost under the onslaught of the Milton Friedmanite ideology from the 1960s onward where businesses are held to have no responsibility for the welfare of society, but only for generating the highest possible returns for investors. 

Here is a graphic picture of what has been one of the consequences for Americans:

If it feels like you’re working longer hours for less money than your parents or grandparents did, it’s because you probably are. Adjusted for inflation, average hourly wages have actually fallen since the early 1970s, while average hours worked have steadily climbed. American workers are increasingly underpaid, overworked, and overwhelmed.

What went wrong? In part, overtime pay.

If you’re under the age of 45, you may have no idea that overtime pay is even a thing. But believe it or not, middle-class workers used to get a lot of it, while you likely don’t get any at all. That means that every hour you work over 40 hours a week you work for free, contributing to a giant pool of free labor that modern employers have come to expect and exploit. Profits are up, real wages are down, and income inequality has soared to its highest level since the Gilded Age [period of rapid growth in U.S. 1870-1900].

The writer goes on to say that employers—but let's widen the reference to managers (see how Apple's top lawyer got $27 million last year on a base salary of $1 million)—are able to live it up while the typical employee finds it tough to pay for childcare:

It wasn’t always this way. Overtime pay was one of the biggest deals of the New Deal reforms—along with the prohibition of child labor and the establishment of a federal minimum wage, it was one of the three core provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The FLSA literally changed the way we think about work: by establishing a salary threshold below which workers were guaranteed time-and-a-half pay for every hour worked over 40 hours a week, it was the FLSA that created both the weekend and the eight-hour day. “Except perhaps for the Social Security Act,” President Franklin Roosevelt declared on the FLSA’s passage in 1938, “it is the most far-reaching, far-sighted program for the benefit of workers ever adopted here or in any other country.”

Benefit program maliciously neglected 

A little history: 

From 1938 into the 1970s a robust federal overtime standard served as a kind of minimum wage for the middle class, providing both a valuable source of extra income and an invaluable shield against the imposition of exploitative working hours. At its inception the FLSA set the minimum wage at one-half the median wage and the overtime threshold at three times the minimum—an amount equal to 1.5 times the median wage, a level high enough to cover about two-thirds of salaried workers. Over the next few decades, thanks in part to these strong labor standards, real wages at all income levels broadly grew in lockstep with growth in worker productivity.

Year after year as the median wage grew, both the minimum wage and the overtime threshold were regularly adjusted upward to maintain the FLSA’s intended 0.5 (minimum) to 1.0 (median) to 1.5 (overtime) ratio. For more than three decades overtime pay was the norm; most American workers expected to be paid 150 percent of their regular wage for every hour worked over 40 hours a week, and most employers expected to pay it. And since time-and-a-half gets expensive fast, employers were strongly incentivized to hire more workers in order to avoid routinely incurring the added cost. 

The result has been for the powerful to treat fellow Americans with contempt:

But sometime around 1975 the prosperity of working Americans was dramatically severed from that of the economy as a whole. Entranced by an emerging free market neoliberal consensus, both Congress and federal regulators quietly abandoned the historic 0.5 to 1.0 to 1.5 ratio, allowing the overtime threshold and the minimum wage to be relentlessly eaten away by inflation. Our current minimum wage of $7.25 an hour now stands at little more than a quarter of the median wage and has not been adjusted since 2009. 

At one point, the overtime threshold remained unchanged for 29 years. And absent the strong labor standards the FLSA once provided, wages inevitably stagnated too. Today’s median wage of $52,520 stands at just 54 percent of what it otherwise would be had its growth continued to track growth in worker productivity. In fact, over the past 45 years, nearly all of the benefits of economic growth have accrued to top one-percenters like me. 

Furthermore:

Today’s $35,568 overtime threshold now stands at only 67 percent of the already diminished median wage and covers only 15 percent of salaried workers, compared to over 60 percent in 1975. If you earn more than $35,568 a year (and 85 percent of American workers do), chances are you’ve been misclassified into an “exempt” position that does not receive any overtime pay at all. As the memory of overtime pay fades away, employers are taking full advantage.

According to a 2019 Gallup poll, 52 percent of full-time workers report working more than 40 hours a week; 39 percent work at least 50 hours a week, and 18 percent work at least 60. Yet few of these workers are paid a penny of overtime for all the extra hours they put it in on the job. Overtime pay is no longer the norm. As a result, Americans are working longer hours at lower wages while employers and shareholders reap record profits.

This illustrates how societies can collectively forget what is of benefit to their members if their attention is directed elsewhere, especially by the pressure of burdens placed on them, such as the threat of firing or being declared redundant, given the associated banishement of union solidarity in the workplace.

But, as the author says, it doesn't have to be that way. The overtime threshold can be raised by an administrative order, not needing legislation:

No doubt opponents will argue that raising the overtime threshold by any measure would be a surefire “job killer”, because that’s what they have always cynically argued about every policy intended to benefit working people, from child labor laws to workplace safety regulations to the minimum wage. And in the case of overtime, this job-killer logic is particularly wrong. In fact, it has been the steady erosion of the overtime threshold over the past 50 years that has been the real job-killer, enabling corporations to effectively convert three 40-hour-a-week jobs into two 60-hour-a-week jobs, and to pocket the 40 hours in lost wages.

I know, because as a venture capitalist and serial tech entrepreneur I built a lot of personal wealth doing exactly that. Of course, do it at a single tech startup and you end up with a bunch of miserable burned-out twenty-somethings working crazy hours in exchange for decent pay and a shot at striking it rich off stock options. But do that 60 million times across the entire economy, and you effectively kill 20 million middle-class jobs. This has been the most underappreciated driver of stagnant wages and rising inequality over the past 50 years: the jobs lost to a steadily eroding overtime threshold. 

In addition, the ensuing inequality is staggering:

According to a study by the RAND Corporation, rising inequality since 1975 is responsible for a $50 trillion upward redistribution of wealth and income from the bottom 90 percent households to those in the top 1 percent—roughly $2.5 trillion in 2018 alone. That $2.5 trillion is enough to more the double median income—enough to pay every single working American in the bottom nine deciles an additional $13,728 a year (an amount remarkably close to the additional $13,787 a year the median wage earner would take home if they were paid time-and-a-half for the average seven hours of overtime worked every week). 

With the mid-term U.S. elections in mind:

Free labor may sound good to corporate CEOs, but it’s terrible for working families and the economy as a whole. If Democrats know what’s good for them, they will raise the overtime threshold to at least $85,000 a year and proudly run on it, leaving it to Republicans to explain to voters why the American middle-class should be expected to work overtime for free.

For me, this recommendation for urgent action is a case study of what affects working families around the world. Economic exploitation is rampant even in what are regarded as sophisticated economies. But without the power that comes from solidarity with fellow workers, applied through a union, working people are at the mercy of those who wish to elevate their own wealth, and status, and aura of success, defying God.

As Christian morality has faded from many WEIRD societies so immoral economic practices have returned. 

Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. (James 5:4)

Unions as a winning way of life 

Time has another article that is very relevant to this topic, that relating to the suppression of unions in the US, and to possibility of their return as more working people realize the degree of repression inflicted on them. 

Unions became popular in the U.S. starting in the 1930s, with membership rising from just over 10% of the eligible working population in 1936 to about a third by the mid-1950s, according to 2021 research published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. That remained the case until the mid-1980s, when they fell out of favor, thanks to a culture in which companies refocused on maximizing shareholder value and minimizing worker benefits, as well as a court-backed emphasis on the value of private property and private profit. 

By 2002 union membership had fallen to about 15% of the workforce, but the article notes the recent resurgence of a unionising movement.

During unions’ heyday in the U.S. the income gap between the richest and poorest Americans shrunk considerably. “The only time that the bottom tenth of the population and the top tenth of the population have come closer together has been during those years, when unions were operating in the largest corporations in this country,” [Stanford University's Ileen] Devault says. As unionization declined in the 1970s and 80s, that income gap grew once more. Today, it is at an all-time high since tracking began over 50 years ago, based on Census Bureau data. Research shows that as much as $50 trillion has migrated into the coffers of the top 1% of income earners in the U.S., an upward redistribution of wealth that has squeezed out the middle class.

Unions are responsible for bargaining contracts between workers and employers that guarantee anything from better working conditions to higher wages—on average union households have received 10-20% better pay than non-union households, according to one study. When benefits are considered, that improvement can rise to nearly 30%. And while that is certainly a boon for the workers themselves, corporations must adjust both their balance sheets and employment practices to acquiesce to the contracts. That’s at the heart of the battle between the two forces.

The distinctly American value of revering private property over public goods has made this relationship particularly challenging, says Devault. “We’re all supposed to try to gain as much private property as we can, and then protect it from anybody who isn’t us, whatever that means,” she says. “And I think that emphasis—and the fact that the courts have bought into that emphasis on private property—has meant that unions have always been seen as somehow against the whole idea of private property.” Instead of viewing unionization as a net positive that supports better returns for everyone contributing to a company, companies view their bottom line and profits as property that needs to be protected from workers.

Plus, unions give workers power that doesn’t always jive with the preferences of corporate leaders. “Unions aren’t just about higher wages. They are very much about workers having a say about what happens in the workplace,” Devault says. “And that’s what employers don’t like.” When things like vacation policies, health care benefits, and firing practices are set by the union and not the employer, it means the employer becomes more responsible for its workers—and less capable of, say, instituting layoffs.

[W]hen unions are functioning well, Devault says, they aren’t just about pay—but about making sure that workers have more overall power in the workplace. “The pandemic has really changed the way people look at their work,” she says. “We’re starting to see now [that one of those changes is that] I want some say in what goes on in my workplace.” And when workers have more say, they can be more invested in their company’s future, too.

Read the article in full, for a useful look at the false accounting and rhetorical posturing that goes on when corporate bosses find they are having the prospect of facing up to workers and their representatives.   Here is the link again.

The arrangements we make about work are up to us. We have the opportunity to exert personal agency to restore overtime pay, to build in greater flexibility, to experience afresh the cooperative solidarity of old, and in doing so, free ourselves from the general debilitating individualism we learn from our consumerist society.   

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Religion and science: a meeting of minds

Is 'Who were Adam and Eve?' even a question? Graphic: Source

The trans-Atlantic New Atheism tag team of figures such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, the late Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and former Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali have certainly had an impact on the public's attitudes towards science and religion, according to a report published in Britain in the past week.

The report from Theos, the Christian think tank which commissioned the research, "draws on a three-year project in which the researchers conducted over a hundred in-depth interviews with leading academics and science communicators, and commissioned a YouGov public opinion poll of over 5,000 British adults".

There is good news for those hoping for a balanced conversation on the topic, but it's worthwhile studying first the fact of the residue of antagonism that has been deposited – or cultivated  – in the public's mind by the campaigning of that tiny clique of atheists who loved to court controversy, with their efforts ebbing in more recent years.

The 'science-religion' research report's executive summary provides these negative findings:

The British public are more likely, by a proportion of 2:1, to think that science and religion are incompatible (57%) than compatible (30%). 

There is an even more pronounced difference (3:1) between those who think they are strongly incompatible (22%) than those who think they are strongly compatible (7%). 

This issue has a noticeable gendered and ethnic dimension. Men are more likely to voice an opinion on this matter and to be hostile than are women. Conversely, respondents from non-white ethnic groups are more likely to be positive than white respondents.

Of those who expressed an opinion, 68% of white respondents were on balance ‘incompatible’, compared with 48% of those from nonwhite ethnic groups respondents. In effect, white men are the group most likely to have a negative view of science and religion.

However, the good news on attitudes concerning the interaction of science and religion suggests that "the angry hostility towards religion engineered by the New Atheist movement is over". 

The summary states: 

About 15 years ago, [...] a ComRes poll found that 42% of UK adults agreed that “faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate”. Today, that figure is 20%. 

By comparison, 46% of people today agree that “all religions have some element of truth in them”, 49% that “humans are at heart spiritual beings”, and 64% of people agree that “there are some things that science will never be able to explain”. 

One of the report's writers adds:

Moreover, younger people are notably less hostile about all this than any previous generation. Gen Zs, aged 16-24 in the survey, are more likely to agree that it is possible to believe in God and evolution, more likely to believe that you can be religious and be a good scientist, more likely to think religion has a place in the modern world than any other generation, more likely to disagree that science will be able to explain everything one day, and more likely to disagree that science is the only way of getting reliable getting knowledge about the world. For them at least, the conflict seems to be passing. 

On closer inspection, there seems to be a conflict of image rather than substance: 

Tension with specific sciences is much less than with ‘science’ in general. If you ask people about their view of religion and science, they are likely to lean towards incompatible. If you ask them about religion and a specific science, e.g. neuroscience, medical science, chemistry, psychology, geology or even cosmology, they are more likely to say that, on balance, it doesn’t make it hard to be religious.

A similar point can be made for specific religions. The perception of hostility between ‘science and religion’ is greater than it is between ‘science and Christianity’ or ‘science and Islam’. 

Although much of the science and religion debate has been focused around evolution, it has rightly faded as a matter for contention.  Only 6% of the religious group disagree (3% strongly) with the statement that there is “strong, reliable evidence to support the theory of evolution”.

Religious people and even regular worshippers are only marginally more antagonistic to the theory of evolution than non-religious. Even among strict biblical literalists, a small group (3%) who are traditionally the most hostile to Darwinism, only just over a third rejects evolution.

In fact, any antagonism that may exist between religion and science does not appear to arise from the religion side.  When asked whether they agreed that “the dangers of science outweigh its benefits”, only 12% of the religious grouping strongly agreed or agreed compared with 9% of the general public. Conversely,  61% of the religious disagreed or disagreed strongly, just below the figure for the general public.

On this, the report's writers state that "[...] the religious are no more antagonistic towards science itself than are the non-religious, and:

In short, much of the science and religion ‘battle’ has been smoke – and there has been a lot of smoke – but without much real fire. 

This comes out clearly in the more than 100 in-depth expert interviews with scientists, philosophers, and sociologists. One strong atheist in this expert category stated:

“I want it on record, don’t just list me as an atheist in the Richard Dawkins type. Because I am not an atheist like him at all.” 

The report writer says separately:

Perhaps most tellingly, the sense of hostility seems to weaken with knowledge and education. The higher your level of education or knowledge is, the less likely you are to think that, for example, “you can’t be a good scientist and be religious”. Indeed, we spoke in depth to leading scientists and philosophers, from Brian Cox to Adam Rutherford – people who were recruited on the basis of their expertise and their non-belief – a surprising number (two-thirds) saw science and religion as compatible, far more than the general public.

 In the words of one interviewee, the evidence seems to show that “there is much less of a conflict for anyone who has had to think a bit about it, whether they be a practicing scientist or a practicing member of a faith community. The idea of a problem comes more from those who aren’t either and who have just picked up the cultural zeitgeist.”

The report writers continue: 

The contention of this report is that the science and religion debate has been distorted by being viewed primarily through a few narrow lenses – in particular, evolution (“vs creation(ism)”), the Big Bang (“vs God”), and neuroscience (“vs religious experiences”) – and because these are ‘conflictual’ lenses, the resulting picture is one of wholesale conflict, a conflict that the public feels but finds it hard to locate or explain.

The research findings seem to provide evidence for the view that:

 “‘Science and Religion’ is a lot like a swimming pool. All the noise is up at the shallow end.”

The commissioning think-tank acknowledges that there are remaining areas of conflict but the hope is that by understanding it better deeper issues can be examined in a mutually respectful manner. Rather than a war of words, the goal is to have a meeting of minds on matters such as metaphysics, epistemology, anthropology, and ethics.

Two of the expert comments were these, first with regards anthropology and then ethics: 

“Although there are tensions within modern thinking, I don’t think they’re specifically problems for religious belief, they’re problems for our ways of thinking about ourselves as human beings.” 

 “I think there is a real tension [here] but I think it’s an area, having said that, where having religious people and scientists together discussing it can be very interesting and possibly fruitful.”

The report itself states:

Properly speaking (as a number of philosophers and sociologists of science and practising scientists themselves pointed out in our interviews), science itself is an inherently conflictual process. Disagreement is not a problem. 

There is no reason why the science and religion conversation should be any different. In the process of those disagreements, some will come to a place of broad compatibility between science and religion, some to one of broad incompatibility, and some will linger in ongoing contestability. That is fine.

The goal, then is not "premature or unwarranted harmony" nor "staged and exaggerated conflict". 

What we hope is that, wherever people do find themselves on this issue, they do so on the basis of the best and most nuanced thinking possible, and that, in the process, they get a taste for quite how stimulating and intellectually provocative the field of ‘science and religion’ really is.

To close, we note this statement in the report, perhaps referring to the discrete disciplines of the History of Science, and the Philosophy of Science:

What is important is to recognise that the territory of science even today still has complex, contestable borders and numerous different elements within it. 

That issue, and others relating to the nature of religion, are worthy of scrutiny in a further post. Look out for it in the coming week.

Ω Find the full Science and Religion report here 

Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.

Making babies in the most unnatural way

Nick Jonas and Priyanka Chopra. Photo from Chopra's Instagram

Horse-wrangling a baby into the world is one way of describing the work of the fertility industry, which is sucessfully promoting its technologies at a time when society otherwise cries out for nature to be respected to the utmost degree. 

There is the physical and mental torture that women must endure in in vitro fertilisation (IVF), but also the health impact on the children arriving in this way.

The ways in which IVF is an attack on a woman's body are made clear for us in Kourtney Kardashian's confessions on the most recent episode of The Kardashians. She said medication as part of her IVF treatment 'basically put me into depression'. She added:

'I think because I'm so clean and careful about what I put into my body, it's just like having the complete opposite reaction and working as a contraceptive instead of helping us.'

'I have everything in the world to be happy about. I just feel a little bit off and not like myself. Super moody and hormonal, like I am a lunatic half the time.'  

The article goes on to explain:

IVF is usually used by women or couples who are struggling to conceive naturally, and it involves the retrieval of eggs from the ovaries, which are then fertilized by sperm in a lab, before being transferred into the uterus.

Many women who are preparing to undergo IVF will be given one or more forms of fertility drug by their doctor, which are used to trigger the release of hormones that then stimulate egg production.

As well as the destruction of unused human embryos, a scientific journal lays out the dangers to women:

There are a number of potential risks to women who conceive through in vitro fertilisation (IVF). Among these, ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome and multiple pregnancies are the most serious. Other potential risks include increased levels of anxiety and depression, ovarian torsion, ectopic pregnancy, pre-eclampsia, placenta praevia, placental separation and increased risk of cesarean section. 

Another article reports how unserious this manner of having a baby can be, given the self-centred mentality so apparent in society: 

Last year, Kourtney confessed on Ellen DeGeneres' YouTube show Lady Parts that she was peer pressured into the freezing eggs procedure before turning 40.

She explained: 'I froze mine too. Hopefully they're sitting there okay. Just for... you never know. I really got talked into it. 

'I was like, "Okay whatever, I'll do it one time. Since everyone else is doing it I might as well."

'Everyone's doing it. I believe I was 39. Top notch, top tier. I think it gave me a feeling of, like, taking a deep breath. You know I was 39 and I was about to turn 40 and everyone was like, "If you're going to do it, you've gotta do it now."

'So I was like, "Okay everyone, stop rushing me. I don't even know if I want to have another kid or if that's like in the future or whatever."

Meanwhile, children are affected by this technological process. A study has found that children born after IVF treatments have a greater chance of certain health problems. A newpaper report of the study states:

Children conceived from parents who used infertility treatments may be at an increased risk of developing asthma, eczema or having allergies, a new United States study finds.

Researchers at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, both part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), found that the treatments have been growing in prevalence in recent years may be leaving the child vulnerable.

Children who are conceived after the use of the treatment are 77 percent more likely to suffer from eczema, at a 30 percent increase risk of asthma, and are 45 percent more likely to require a prescriptions allergy medication in their youth.

The mechanism causing this phenomena could not be determined by the NIH research team, but they are calling for further investigation into potential links between the treatment and these types of conditions. 

Background to the study included these points:

These types of treatments are gaining popularity around the U.S., making the findings of the NIH have wide reaching effects on Americans.

According to a Pew Research Center poll in 2018, around a third of U.S. adults had either used themselves or know someone that used the treatment. Nearly half of college educated adults, and half of those that makes $75,000 per year or more, also reported using or knowing someone that had used the treatment.

The researchers, who published their findings last week in Human Reproduction, gathered data from 5,000 mothers and 6,000 children that were born from 2008 to 2010.

The mothers were surveyed on whether they used the treatment before, their own health and the health of their children. 

 'Specifically, we saw that children conceived with infertility treatments – including in vitro fertilization, taking drugs that stimulate ovulation, and undergoing procedures that insert sperm into the uterus – were more likely to have at least 2 reports of wheeze by age 3, which is considered a potential indication of asthma early on,' Dr Edwina Yeung, a researcher at the NIH, told DailyMail.com in an email.

'When we followed these kids to about seven to nine years of age we found children conceived with these treatments were more likely to have asthma, eczema or have a prescription for allergy medication.'

In a similar fashion to the above, the news that Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas have had a baby through surrogacy was widely featured when news broke in January. The South China Morning Post in Hong Kong reported:

According to multiple reports the couple decided to opt for a surrogate because their busy work schedules were interrupting their family planning. It is reported that the actress does not have fertility issues, but it was difficult for them to plan to be together when she could conceive.

It was also reported that Chopra, who is 39, had been involved in a film in London while Jonas was living at their home in Los Angeles. 

The SCMP also reported that in an earlier interview with Vanity Fair, Chopra had said the couple wanted a family and “by God’s grace, when it happens, it happens”.

It's a shame that the couple did not hold steady to that sentiment, for the reason that, as with IVF, surrogacy is a dehumanizing and unnatural business that represents a renunciation of the created order. Employing technologies of various kinds to achieve a child is a distortion of the curative purpose that health care and medical intervention rightly pursue.

Barton Gingerich is an Anglican pastor in Virginia with a concern at the 21st-century’s rapid submission to the customs bred from a Brave New World mindset. He writes:

Obviously, surrogacy finds itself on the fast-track to normalcy (at least among those who can afford it). Only a few years ago, the promises of the fertility industry were the stuff of science fiction, particularly of the dystopian variety. To implant donated sperm and eggs into another woman’s womb and for her to carry the baby to term would strike previous generations as deeply unnatural—which it is.

And surrogacy is a business. Although some generous souls do voluntarily offer to carry someone else’s child, the vast majority of these birth mothers are paid for their services. There’s big money to be had in fulfilling the primal paternal and maternal desires of parents who cannot conceive or, more sinisterly, refuse to suffer the burdens of childbearing but still desire offspring. To the shallow and well-resourced, surrogacy can ensure ease of life and a pre-natal Hollywood body for the wife. Let someone else deal with the wear-and-tear of pregnancy, just pay someone to bear the child. It’s not difficult to see how this could become incredibly popular in materialistic, immoral cultures, with the wealthy offloading the burden of childbearing upon the poor.

Gingerich supports the view that surrogacy dehumanizes both women and children:

Laying aside the immense confusion of who the real mother of a surrogate child truly is, separating a woman from an infant she carried in her womb for around nine months is traumatic and exploitative. Surrogacy turns the woman’s womb into a rented space. Couples that opt for surrogacy simply because they renounce pregnancy do themselves dishonor by revoking their own created nature—a God-given order that governs our flesh and our shared human life.

As for children, they aren’t products—they are sacred gifts of the Creator who opens and closes the womb. In terms of our own conception and gestation, we are begotten, not merely made. When God closes the womb, the right response is not to seek unnatural means.

Of course, children resulting from surrogacy are still of sacred worth and full human dignity, to be cherished by God and men, just like those that were conceived in other bad circumstances, including rape, adultery, incest, and so forth.

Likewise, surrogacy is not the same as adoption. Adoption pivots on pre-existing children who are orphaned or in a deeply broken situation in need of love and care. Surrogacy is about producing children to suit desires. Finally, there is no proof-text verse against surrogacy, just like there isn’t one for insurance fraud or cybercrime. It’s still wrong because it violates clear Biblical principles, particularly the sacred bond that exists among father, mother, and child—a bond God created, ordained, and blessed.

A potent conclusion offers food for thought:

To put things more clearly, women are not incubators. Children are not products. Despite all our pride in our enlightened “progressive” society, we still haven’t learned that the human body is not for sale. Christian ethicists have been sounding the alarm on this issue for decades now, and they will continue to do so in the future.

Ironically, the chaotic moral hellscape of The Handmaid’s Tale may arise, not from patriarchal, religious right-wingers who prize traditional moral values, but from wealthy Hollywood elites and, eventually, aspirational suburban couples who want babies but without suffering and sacrifice. 

Carrying and protecting an unborn baby does entail sacrifice, but that sacrifice lays the foundation for a family in which suffering is inevitable, but where an upwelling of love is achieved through the perserverance already learned.  

Already we are seeing in the WEIRD world the use of IVF and surrogacy of various kinds by single men and women, as well as homosexual couples, with donors providing the means to achieve a child. The use of technology may ensure the satisfaction of "parental" desires, but it also leaves the child with the deep-felt urge to plead: "But tell me who my real mother/father is!"

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The mystery of life for us to wonder at

Natural beauty that inspires us to use our ability to wonder

The ever-creative Maria Popova and American Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman are featured in this post on science, wonder and reality.

The United States-based Popova's work is dedicated to giving people experiences that rekindle their sense of enchantment, a quality much needed as imaginations wither in the desert of modern life. She is a bibliophile and celebrates the best of the literary and arts world, supporting creativity to guide those lost in the wilderness of superficiality that Western culture has become.

One of her latest projects has been a collaborative effort that combines poetry, science, and animated video. The title of this adventure is The Universe in Verse:

a season of perspective-broadening, mind-deepening, heart-leavening stories about science and our search for truth, enlivened by animated poems with original music: emblems of our longing for meaning.

Popova's perspective reaches out beyond the boundaries of the here-and-now, to the point of acknowledgement that what inspires our wonder manifests the profound love shown by God the Creator. 

Her introduction to Feynman's contribution to The Universe in Verse illuminates all of human life: 

Here we are, each of us a portable festival of wonder, standing on this rocky body born by brutality, formed from the debris that first swarmed the Sun 4.5 billion years ago and pulverized each other in a gauntlet of violent collisions, eventually forging the Moon and the Earth.

Here we are, now standing on it, on this improbable planet bred of violence, which grew up to be a world capable of trees and tenderness. A conscious world. A world shaped by physics and animated by art, by poetry, by music and mathematics — the different languages we have developed to listen to reality and speak it back to ourselves.

Here we are, voicing in these different languages our fundamental wonderment: What is all this? This byproduct of reality we call life: not probable, not even necessary, and yet it is all we know, because it is all we are, and it is with the whole of what we are that we reckon with reality, that we long to fathom it — from the scale of gluons to the scale of galaxies, from the mystery of the cell to the mystery of the soul.

In setting the scene for Feynman's piece, Popova writes: 

In the autumn of 1955, a decade before he won the Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking work on quantum electrodynamics, Feynman took the podium at the National Academy of Sciences to contemplate the value of science. Midway through his characteristically eloquent and intellectually elegant lecture, addressing the country’s most orthodox audience of academic scientists, he burst into what can best be described as a splendid prose-poem about the mystery and wonder of life, inspired by a reflective moment he spent alone on the edge of the sea, where Rachel Carson, too, found the meaning of life. It later became the epilogue to Feynman’s final collection of autobiographical reflections, What Do You Care What Other People Think?, published the year of his death [1988].

[UNTITLED ODE TO THE WONDER OF LIFE]

by Richard Feynman

I stand at the seashore, alone, and start to think. There are the rushing waves… mountains of molecules, each stupidly minding its own business… trillions apart… yet forming white surf in unison.

Ages on ages… before any eyes could see… year after year… thunderously pounding the shore as now. For whom, for what?… on a dead planet, with no life to entertain.

Never at rest… tortured by energy… wasted prodigiously by the sun… poured into space. A mite makes the sea roar.

Deep in the sea, all molecules repeat the patterns of one another till complex new ones are formed. They make others like themselves… and a new dance starts.

Growing in size and complexity… living things, masses of atoms, DNA, protein… dancing a pattern ever more intricate.

Out of the cradle onto the dry land… here it is standing… atoms with consciousness… matter with curiosity.

Stands at the sea… wonders at wondering… I… a universe of atoms… an atom in the universe.

 Yes, our two creative commentators agree. Feynman denotes each of us as a superb "I", splendid because we are "atoms with consciousness... matter with curiosity", crowned with excessive capabilities  —  each of us "wonders at wondering". We are endowed, as Popova states, with "life: not probable, not even necessary", and beyond that outrageous element of reality, we have in our hearts the eyes to contemplate "the mystery and wonder of life".  

Ω See also this post on science and immortality.

Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.

I’m a licensed physician in Florida. I got this amazing notice today from the Florida Health Department. They sent it to all doctors. pic.twitter.com/VP6qpM8Leg

— Grazie Christie, M.D. (@GChristiemd) April 20, 2022

Trans sports people warn against transgender access

Mianne Bagger, played competitive women's golf after transitioning

It's telling that even sports people who identify as the opposite sex reject the proposition that transgender players should be have complete freedom to compete against those who are, in reality, of the opposite sex. 

A case in point is Mianne Bagger, an Australian professional golfer who made history at the Women's Australian Open as the first transgender athlete to compete in a professional golf tournament. Bagger, who transitioned in 1995, explained in an newpaper interview why it was necessary to support the moves in Australia to enact legislation to exclude persons of one sex from competing in sports designated as being for the opposite sex.

Bagger, now 55 years old, said that for a man transitioning there is a loss of strength and stamina, but only over a long time.

However, the main factor is to protect women-only spaces. Bagger said in the interview:

"These days, [the dynamic] has crept into what's called self ID or self identification: male-bodied people presenting as women, who live as women, with varying degrees of medical intervention and in some degrees, no medical intervention, which is just — it's crossed the line, in my view, it really has … It's a slap in the face to women."

She stressed that, when considering the bill, it was "really important" to note "the difference between general society and sport, particularly really high-level sport".

"In every day society, of course we want an inclusive, egalitarian [society]. We want equality, lack of discrimination, and of course every single person should have equal access to life and services and work in society. Of course we all want that, and so do I.

"In sport? It's different. Sport is about physical ability. It's not just about discrimination, it's not just about equality and equal access. It is a physical ability. Now, if you've got one group — males — that are on average stronger, taller, faster, as opposed to women, there has to be a divide. There has to be a division."

Bagger would answer in the affirmative the question: Can one be a true supporter of transgender rights, while also maintaining that an athlete such as American swimmer Lia Thomas, a biological male, shouldn’t be allowed to compete in the women’s division?

Another is American Nancy Hogshead-Makar, who won three swimming gold medals at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and is now an outspoken proponent of women’s sports.

As Associated Press columnist Paul Newberry writes:

Hogshead-Makar considers herself a liberal on social issues. She also has made it clear that she thinks Thomas has a huge biological advantage that should bar her from taking part in women’s events.

“We’ve got people who are twisting themselves into pretzels trying to justify the fact that they didn’t get their act together and change the policy so that it’s fair for biological women,” Hogshead-Makar said in an interview, less than 24 hours after Thomas became the first transgender swimmer to win a national championship.

Newberry says that his view that there was no example of an athlete gaining an unfair advantage after transitioning from male to female has been challenged by Thomas’ performance. He continues:

Competing as a male at the University of Pennsylvania, Thomas had some success but nothing of national significance. After going through hormone-replacement therapy and — let’s make this clear — following the rules set up by the NCAA for transgender athletes, she joined the Penn women’s team and became one of the best college freestylers in the nation.

Qualifying for the NCAA women’s championships at Georgia Tech in three events, Thomas overpowered the field in the closing laps of the 500 free Thursday night, touching 1.75 seconds ahead of everyone else.

What a field it was.

The runner-up, Virginia’s Emma Weyant, was a silver medalist in the 400-meter individual medley at last summer’s Tokyo Olympics. Third-place finisher Erica Sullivan of Texas also won a silver medal in Tokyo, behind the great Katie Ledecky in the 1,500 freestyle. Fourth place went to Stanford’s Brooke Forde, who earned an Olympic silver in the 4x200 free relay.

Thomas finished fifth in Friday night’s 200 freestyle. She came into the meet as the top seed, just as she was in the 500, but touched more than 2 seconds behind Stanford Taylor Ruck.

Hogshead-Makar said Thomas’ times as a female swimmer show her biological advantage “has not been mitigated”.

“She didn’t go from being 500th as a male to 500th as a female,” Hogshead-Makar said. “She went from not being able to even qualify for the NCAAs as a male to being a national champion as a female. That’s not fair.”

In her eyes, Thomas’ supporters are blending gender rights with the biological realities of sex.

“I want trans people to be happy. I want them to have full acceptance,” Hogshead-Makar said. “But this isn’t fair to the women’s category. You can hold those two things to be true at the same time.” 

That last thought is in direct contrast to the line pushed by transgender activists that there are so few transgender athletes that there should be minimal supervision on this matter by sports bodies. That argument fails to convince those women athletes who battled to raise the status of women's sports with regards pay, prize money, and public recognition of achievement. If more Lia Thomases appear women athletes would soon lose heart at their ability to make it to the top.

That there has to be a division in sex categories to protect women was also the stance of a leading New Zealand sportswoman last year as a man who identified as a woman was selected to represent New Zealand women in weightlifting at the Olympic Games. At the time, it was reported:

Former New Zealand Olympic medallist Lorraine Moller has questioned the fairness behind allowing transgender athletes to compete in the women's categories at the Games.

Moller's professional running career stretched 22 years and saw her compete at an impressive four Olympic Games starting at the 1984 event in Los Angeles, as well as three Commonwealth Games.

The now 66-year-old was also a strong advocate for women's rights in sport, calling on female athletes to be paid alongside men at a time when they received nothing.

Moller is continuing her support for women's sport, and has taken aim at the potential inclusion of transgender athletes in women's categories at the Olympic Games.

"We fought very hard in our time, especially for us women who didn't have parity in the Olympic events. We were involved in a campaign back then just to have our own events for ourselves, separate from the men's category," she said. 

"Now we have suddenly this whole issue of men who identify as women wanting to be included in the women's category, and I find that very concerning and it seems that there's a possibility of derailing the very thing that we fought for because men have considerable advantage across the board. The top women could never beat the top men and if it had been an open category, I would never have had an Olympic team or stood on the podium." 

Moller says there is a petition going on behalf of Save Women's Sport - an organisation that's part of an international coalition of women's sport organisations, athletes and support - that believes "sport must be categorised by sex, not gender identity".

Society needed to give more guidance to sports bodies in order to have "more review and be very careful before we allow men to take part in women's sports because we certainly wouldn't want to derail or dilute the opportunities that have been created for young women to enjoy sport at all levels," Moller said.

It's not only sport where men identifying as women were seen to be creating difficulties for women. It has arisen as a problem for women employed in financial services in Britain when it came to assessing equality of access to management positions and to company boards.

The Financial Conduct Authority has now ruled that men identifying as women should not be automatically registered as women in female diversity quotas.

This was a change from an earlier plan to make it compulsory to include "those self-identifying as women" in female diversity targets for boards and senior management roles. The change came after hundreds of women complained about the possible distortion in the actual number of women in those roles.

According to the newspaper report used as the source of this information:

The move is part of the FCA's wider "comply or explain" push for diversity - which will also demand that at least one board member be from an ethnic minority. Companies who fail to meet the requirements will be expected to "explain why not". 

The report also noted that transgender activists had created such an outcry that the regulator had to water down its requirement, "ultimately giving UK-listed companies the 'flexibility' to decide how they report their female quotas".

City of London lawyer Cathy Pitt, who is a member of the Sex Matters advisory group, said:

Collecting and reporting data on sex remains important, because how else can we measure improvement on closing the gap between men and women? Large listed firms still need to tackle sex-based discrimination on everything from pay and promotion to harassment and corporate culture.

Maya Forstater, executive director of Sex Matters, said: 

The FCA was wise to allow companies to report straightforwardly on the proportion of male and female members of their boards, [...], and not to start requiring them to ask board members to declare that they have one of many fluid “gender identities”. It is not for the financial regulator to redefine what ‘man’ and ‘woman’ mean.

That last point is an important one. It's for society as a whole to uphold the biological reality of a person's sex so that good order is preserved in society. The FCA had been pressured by activist groups to force companies to have management and board members to self-identify, no matter the biological reality, and that personal declaration would be entered  

 A sensible rethink changed that requirement, as we saw above.

In such instances as these, we have seen how, whether with sports bodies or other authorities, the promotion of a transgender ideology that proclaims that each person has a "right" to declare their own sex and that everyone else must comply with that declaration - how unfettered self-invention disrupts the harmony that the usual forms of self-restraint of personal desires allow. 

Here is the original form the Financial Conduct Authority put forward for use by companies in assessing sex diversity:

Here is the form that the FCA finally decided would be operative:

 
To conclude, in his column quoted above, Paul Newberry talks of the goal of fairness and equality when it comes to athletes who identify with the opposite sex. That's a noble sentiment - yes, there is a "but" - but we have to compare like to like for both to be achieved. Personal desires are fine except when they involve the impostion of principles that would transform and re-define social goods like how society can recognise essential characteristics of its members. Society also has a responsibility to protect its members, and to preserve the best conditions for the fundamental life-giving cell of society, the family.

We must respect the minuscule group who suffer from true gender dysphoria. However, the aggressive promotion to young people in particular that the binary nature of biological reality is false, must be combatted so that key elements of society are safeguarded  The first of those elements is individual identity, and the second is the family as formed with biologically (meaning physically, psychologically, and emotionally) complementary parents. Therefore, vigilance against the virus that is wokeism, and its mutant offspring, transgender ideology, is imperative for the well-being of all.

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