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  Beyond Nature’s Housekeepers: American Women in Environmental History

  Nancy Unger

  From pre-Columbian times to the environmental justice movements of the present, women and men frequently responded to the environment and environmental issues in profoundly different ways. Although both environmental history and women's history are flourishing fields, explorations of the synergy produced by the interplay between environment and sex, sexuality, and gender are just beginning. Offering more than biographies of great women in environmental history, Beyond Nature's Housekeepers examines the intersections that shaped women's unique environmental concerns and activism and that framed the way the larger culture responded. Women featured include Native Americans, colonists, enslaved field workers, pioneers, homemakers, municipal housekeepers, immigrants, hunters, nature writers, soil conservationists, scientists, migrant laborers, nuclear protestors, and environmental justice activists. As women, they fared, thought, and acted in ways complicated by social, political, and economic norms, as well as issues of sexuality and childbearing. Nancy C. Unger reveals how women have played a unique role, for better and sometimes for worse, in the shaping of the American environment.

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  Knowledge for Love: Franciscan Science as the Pursuit of Wisdom

  Keith Douglass Warner

  This essay extends the retrieval of the Franciscan intellectual tradition into the sciences by presenting the vocation and work of three Franciscan scientists. Friar Bartholomew the Englishman taught his fellow Franciscans with the best available scientific knowledge to prepare them for preaching in foreign lands. Friar Roger Bacon conducted research into the natural world to advance scientific knowledge in service of the Church. Friar Bernardino de Sahagún investigated the life, worldview and culture of the Aztec peoples in New Spain (now Mexico) to interpret these for his fellow Franciscans. In the Franciscan tradition, learning about nature helps one grow in wisdom, and thus Franciscan science is knowledge for love. This essay argues that the retrieval of our Franciscan intellectual tradition could and should include the sciences. This is the eighth in a series intended to encompass topics which will connect the Franciscan Intellectual Tradition with today s language of our Christian Catholic Franciscan way of Gospel Life. Previous volumes have presented an overview of the tradition,discussed dimensions of creation and Christian anthropology in Franciscan theology, and illustrated them through an iconographic tradition found in the Gospel of John.

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  The Unknowable and the Counterintuitive: The Surprising Insights of Modern Science

  Aleksandar I. Zecevic

  Although classical physics provides fairly simple explanations for a wide range of phenomena, it clearly fails to describe some of the subtler workings of nature. As a result, there is widespread agreement among scientists that the Newtonian paradigm is inadequate, and must be replaced by a more sophisticated view of reality. This book examines what such an outlook might entail, and explains why we need to reevaluate some of our most deeply ingrained beliefs about the world we live in. A distinguishing feature of this book is that it combines insights from chaos theory, metamathematics, quantum mechanics, and the theory of relativity, which are seldom (if ever) united under a single title. What binds these seemingly disparate disciplines together is the recognition that each of them reveals certain counterintuitive aspects of nature, and suggests that human knowledge is inherently limited. In that respect, this book represents a natural “technical companion” to Truth, Beauty, and the Limits of Knowledge: A Path from Science to Religion (University Readers, 2012), which examines the philosophical and theological implications of modern science.

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  Truth, Beauty, and the Limits of Knowledge: A Path from Science to Religion

  Aleksandar I. Zecevic

  Is it rational for scientifically trained individuals to believe in God, and accept controversial theological claims such as the existence of miracles? Are science and theology essentially incompatible, or can their positions be reconciled on some level? This book addresses such questions by recasting certain key religious teachings in a language that is familiar to scientists, engineers, and mathematicians. It does so with the help of various science-based metaphors and analogies, whose primary purpose is to interpret theological claims in a way that is attuned to the spirit of our age. A crucial step in developing such “analogical bridges” between science and religion involves challenging the traditional Newtonian paradigm, which maintains that physical processes are generally deterministic and predictable (i.e., “well behaved”). A closer examination of recent scientific developments will show that this assumption is incorrect, and that certain aspects of nature will remain unknowable to us regardless of future technological advances. This realization opens the door to a meaningful conversation between science and theology, since both disciplines implicitly accept the premise that the true nature of “reality” can never be fully grasped by the human mind.