Fight Club or Community of Life, cont.

“It’s a broadcast, not a publication”: this adage, which Andrew Sullivan learned from online gossip pioneer Matt Drudge, became a central tenet of Sullivan’s definitive account of what a blog is.

This site is more publication than broadcast, but I have Andrew’s adage always in mind – along with some of the other points he made in “Why I Blog.” Such as the idea that a post reflects the writer’s thinking at a particular moment, so it’s not sporting to go back and revise a post – it’s better to write a fresh post expressing the change in your thinking.

So I am already circling back to yesterday’s post about Alan Lightman (who declares that nature “simply is”) and Elizabeth Johnson (who understands nature as a “community of life”).

Alan read the post and responded promptly:

I would certainly not expect us to agree on everything. Back-and-forth dialogue is part of the delight of the human experience.

Alan’s response made me realize that the post suggested that I stand with Johnson, and to a certain extent he’s right. But it also made me realize that I hadn’t quite made the point I’d hoped to make, which is this. The Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has called out Prof. Johnson for what they see as doctrinal deviancy in her book Quest for the Living God and elsewhere. But the controversy over her work has obscured the fact that she and they share an account of the world as creation that is fairly quickly becoming a controversial minority position in public life, culture, and the arts. It seems to me that many people who profess to be religious act in daily life according to practical assumptions that owe more to the scientific worldview than the religious one, and for good reasons. The frankly mystical language of Johnson’s writing about creation makes clear just how bold, strange, and challenging – vexing — the religious account is, and how rarely it is spelled out as such by people in leadership positions in the churches. It seems to me that the people who would censure Prof. Johnson’s work could do better in making clear just how substantially she and they are on the same side in these things.

The photographs atop both posts, by the way, were taken in the Galapagos.

• 13 May 2014