Recommended

Windmills of Lewis County

This coming Monday, Sept. 5th, I'm going to start a long series of postings on the subject of "the church," which will take up most of this month.  Partly, I want to give the science & religion theme a rest for awhile, partly do some postings of more immediate relevance to First Presbyterian Church, Lowville, and partly spend less time trolling the Web (for awhile).  In the meantime, here's a couple of items I have come across that might be of interest to some Rom Phra Khun readers:

The first item has to do with idolatry, one of the minor themes I've been playing with here.  It is by David Novak and is entitled, "Idolatry: the Root of All Evil," posted in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation website's section on religion and ethics.   Novak focuses on the American theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, who used the biblical notion of idolatry to describe the deadly, evil ideologies rampant in the 1930s and 1940s.  It's a good article.

Also worth reading is Jeffry Small's article on the Huffington Post website entitled, "The Common Ground Between Science and Religion."  Small describes the way in which commentators tend to be polarized regarding the relationship of religion and science and to overstate the one over the other.  Science, he observes, is good at explaining how things work but doesn't do as well on what life means.  He concludes,

"Atheist critiques of religion, like those from Oxford Biologist Richard Dawkins and Cambridge Physicist Stephen Hawking, are only valid in that they disprove a certain antiquated image of God -- the grandfather in the sky who created the universe like a potter or a watchmaker might and who governs it like a cosmic chess master. If we allow our religions to evolve, we might find that science and religion can complement each other: each may open a different window into reality, just as art and science do."

The article is a good short inquiry into the conflicted question of science and religion.

That's the couple of articles.  Here's one other thing I came across in the last day or so that has nothing to do with anything except it piques my interest as somebody who once was a practicing historian.  The Aussies have turned up the skeletal remains of one of their great folk heroes, the outlaw Ned Kelly—without his skull.  Besides the fact that it is interesting, the main reason for the clip below is that I've just figured out how to link directly to videos on line (as you will have noticed yesterday) and want to do it again—for fun.  So, here's Ned Kelly.  Enjoy.