Friday, June 5, 2009

As I come to the end of the middle ages...

Being a middle aged man – Is that a 60 year old man who thinks he’s going to live to 120, or a man of the Middle Ages? Probably a little of each. – I find the world becoming a more and more interesting place. There’s a great cultural shift happening and it's not just the church that's being challenged at it's roots. It feels to me like we're in a period of cultural transition every bit as great as the Renaissance and the Reformation. No one's going to get away unscathed.


Lately I have been listening to a podcast series from CBC radio. It’s the program Ideas with Paul Kennedy, and the series is How to Think About Science with David Cayley. When I hear philosophers and scientist questioning science at such a fundamental level it feels like something’s going on. This isn’t a bunch of reactionary people trying to make the future look more like the past, or disprove evolution, or argue for intelligent design, or a young earth, etc. It’s committed scientists who are coming to believe that the great cultural project we call SCIENCE, that began with Copernicus and Galileo, and has become the lens through which we see everything, needs a mega rethink. And scientists find rethinking as hard as the rest of us.


Click on the link above, download a few, and give a listen.


And here’s another link for you, Junk Pile Playground. It’s a new blog by Blake Holt. He’s the young pastor I work with. – Actually pushing 40, as his daughter says, but for some reason these middle aged farts look like kids to me. – Blake’s mentoring me into this new world, and I think you’ll see why I’m feeling good about the future. And anyway, we should all love the future more and more as we get older. If you like strange stuff, the future’s getting stranger and stranger. And if you don’t, well, it’s getting shorter and shorter.

No comments: