Vision
The Immortalists
David Bosworth summarizes then denies the claims of what he calls “The New Immortalists,” scientists and software engineers who believe they can beat death and make it possible for human beings to live forever (the Hedgehog Review, Summer 2015). He focuses on the work of cryogenics advocates and computer scientists who believe that science, medicine, and technology can overcome aging and its effects to prolong life indefinitely. Mr. Bosworth insists that such thinking arose because “Material confidence was being mustered to mask a metaphysical cowardice, providing a way to dodge those final questions of meaning and purpose that our mortality imposed, and inducing in their place an undue hope, which could then be exploited to close the sale on a whole series of the con man’s dubious wares.” It is dangerous to think of the human body in merely material or technological terms, because then we begin to believe this, and all of life reduces to glitches or upgrades or tweaks or replacements and repairs. The work of “immortalists”, however, reveals an insight to the human character. Somehow we know we are meant to live forever, and, having dismissed the possibility of the Biblical scenario, this material life being all there is, we are driven to prolong it by any and every means. 

Disciplines
Art and Science
“Reading from Two Books” is a symposium in the Summer 2015 issue of Image. Its purpose is to explain that science, art, and faith are all ways of knowing and should therefore learn to live together in peace. Yes. Why can’t we all just get along? The symposium features brief essays from artists and scientists who have “faith” in common and who all support the basic premise of the symposium. These essays are only partially successful. They do make the point that art and science are both valid ways of looking at the world and of discerning our place in it. However, the overarching narrative is confused from the beginning by taking a form of the subtitle of the symposium as its guiding force, meanwhile leaving the promise of the title largely unexplored. The subtitle is, “Nature, Scripture, and Evolution,” but it really should be “Art, Science, Evolution, and ‘Faith.’” The two books – Scripture and creation, the books of divine revelation – are not really considered, and art takes the place of Scripture in the subtitle, leaving Scripture as little more than the faint background noise within which this inconsistent – and sometimes incoherent – conversation unfolds. We need symposia like this. But future such conversations will need a little more direction, and much better editorial guidance, if they are to contribute to a better understanding of how we know what we know, and to what uses such knowledge should be put.

In the Circle of Knowledge
In our home as a child we had a set of World Book Encyclopedia, from which I perused articles from time to time as grade school interests or demands determined. At present I have a subscription to Encyclopedia Britannica on my tablet, which I read with interest or for background with some frequency. Neither of these encyclopedic sets has changed either my life or our world. “Encyclopedia” is a word meaning “in the circle of knowledge.” One might suppose that regular recourse to an encyclopedia might be of much use in making one’s way in life. These days, however, when secularism is triumphant as the official framework for knowing anything, most encyclopedia are merely factual – boring, unimaginative, and non-threatening to any established order. The same can be said for Wikipedia. But this has not always been the case. The first modern encyclopedia, edited in the 18^th century by Denis Diderot, announced, advertised, and set a footprint for the modern era. In 70,000 articles compiled over the course of two decades, Diderot and the French philosophes re-wrote the worldview of the Western world, marginalizing God and religion and reducing knowledge to material and utilitarian dimensions. Robert Zaretsky reports a summary of Diderot’s work in the July 5, 2015 edition of The Boston Globe (“The ‘great and cursed work’ that was Encyclopedie”). “The work,” Mr. Zaretsky rightly observes, “was one of the Age of Enlightenment’s greatest creations.” The basic message of the articles in Diderot’s massive work is “that human beings are basically good, that free discourse is essential to democracies, that skepticism toward established authority is a good and great thing, and that rational behavior makes for human happiness.” With but a little tweaking and qualifying, it’s not hard to see that these ideas took, and modernity has been the result. Ideas matter. Especially when they are presented in clear, concise, compelling, and comprehensive terms. 

Outcomes
Life in the Middle Ages
I’m encouraged (Glenn Sunshine is elated) whenever I come across a report insisting the Middle Ages were not the benighted period Enlightenment thinkers have led us to believe. When I first began reading the literature from the period of the Celtic Revival (ca. 430-800 AD), I was impressed with many aspects of the faith and life of those people. They were people of their time and place, of course, and so they practiced certain things that seem to us strange, simplistic, or silly. But still... I was beginning to think I might be reading too much into this “benighted” period. But after I read Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization – the title says it all – I was encouraged there might be other literature like this, willing to take a second look, not only at the period of Celtic Christianity, but at the so-called Dark Ages as a whole. I was not disappointed. Charlie Hammett and I have been reading one such book, Rodney Stark’s How the West Won. Stark insists that the Medieval period is the birthplace of reason, science, art, and technology – and therefore of modernity – and that we cannot really understand our own times apart from a more careful assessment of the Middle Ages. A review of three new books on this period in the July 9, 2015 issue of The New York Review of Books, offers additional rethinking about this important period in Western history (Eric Christiansen, “Two Cheers for the Middle Ages!”). Mr. Christiansen does not avoid mentioning aspects of the Medieval period which are better left behind, but his review, and the books in his focus, contribute overall to a more favorable understanding of the period. For a thousand years a decidedly – albeit imperfect – Christian worldview dominated the most civilizing nations and peoples of the world. We have much to learn from our forebears, including those Medieval believers who, it continues to be seen, were neither as “Dark” nor as “benighted” as we might think.

Envoi
A Little of that Celtic Rigor
   ...none knows it but my Lord. Irish, 10th century

Those ancient Celtic missionaries had
it right: Go off somewhere alone and build
yourself a sodden hut; no glitz or gild,
no traffic noise to drive you almost mad
at times; the birds and deer your company
each day; wild nuts, fresh fruit and berries your
cuisine; a symphony of nature for
your entertainment – that’s the life for me!

I’d want my wife along, of course, and not
too far away our favorite bookstore and
café; my laptop and a printer, too,
and don’t forget the smart phone. And we ought
to bring a coffee pot. Ah, I could stand
a little of that Celtic rigor. You?

T. M. Moore