A Sound of Sheer Silence

A while back in this space , I wrote about a book entitled Learning to Walk in the Dark by Barbara Brown Taylor.  The core idea, concept of "lunar faith" as contrasted with "solar faith," was a home run for me.  Many people, maybe even most people, either have or want a faith that is solar--it provides clarity and definition and warmth pretty much all the time.  A faith that has shadows and soft edges, one that masks almost as much as it reveals, would be counter to what they are seeking out of this whole faith project.  I get it, and I can't say I haven't looked to bathe in that solar light.  But I find myself drawn to that softer moonlight, and more to the point I get itchy when there is too much sunlight.  I need things to be a little fuzzy, whether that's because I need the mental space to imagine what is there, or because I'm not quite ready to fully confront what is there, or just because there is a beauty to that fuzziness. But what does luna...

In The Eighteenth of Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte , Karl Marx said, "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."  In the early 17th Century, the Roman Catholic Church committed an enormous, wholly unnecessary own goal when it condemned Galileo's astronomical findings that demonstrated that the solar system revolves around the sun rather than the Earth.  It's important to understand that Galileo was not breaking any new ground with what he was saying, as pretty much every scientifically literate person at the time had a heliocentric view of the universe.  Indeed, that's why it was so damaging--no one  at the time  who knew anything about the topic could take what the Church was saying seriously.  From that, the intellectual world concluded that there was no reason to take anything the Church had to say about the natural world...