Here are a variety of notes and comments I have made on issues that have interested me. More notes, and some longer essays, can be found on other pages of this site. In many cases I wrote these originally for e-mail list messages or Usenet postings. See the index for a complete list
"Absolute Reordination" means that an Anglican Priest who converts to Roman Catholicism and then wants to be a priest in that communion is unconditionally reordained as a Catholic priest. His Anglican Ordination means nothing to the RC's. The reverse is not true. An RC priest who converts to Anglicanism is not reordained. All he has to do is pledge to follow the doctrine, discipline, and worship of ECUSA, or whatever part of the Anglican Communion we are considering. All of this on both sides assumes he satisfied all other requirements for ordination in whichever Diocese we are talking about.
I realize that I used male pronouns throughout the above, but the alternative for any discussion of Roman Catholic Priests is entirely theoretical. Return to index
Anti-matter should not be confused with negative energy. A particle/anti-particle pair has a total energy that is positive. The rest energy of an anti-particle is positive, just like that of an ordinary particle. It is the charge, and various exotic quantum numbers, that cancel out. The Principle of Equivalence then implies that an anti-particle should have a positive gravitational mass, i.e., that it should be attracted by the Earth. Return to index
The physicists John Barrow and Frank Tipler mention Ernest W. Barnes in chapter 3 of The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. Bp. Barnes had an Sc.D. in Mathematics from Cambridge. He was quite conversant with the theoretical physics of his time (c. 1930) including quantum mechanics and general relativity.
At that time the dominant theory of the formation of our solar system was that the sun collided with another star and the resultant debris became the planets, asteroids, etc. Since stellar close encounters are very rare, planetary systems would be correspondingly scarce.
Bishop Barnes argued that the collision theory was not correct. He said that if it were true, it would be impossible to regard the "universe as having been created with a view to the evolution of intelligent beings". Thus he was arguing against a scientific theory from a theological premise, an intellectually courageous act in the post Darwin world.
We now know that Bp. Barnes was correct. Planetary systems are quite common in our galaxy. Better models of their formation have been developed which are consistent with this. However none of this scientific information was available to the Bishop 70 years ago. Return to index
Giordano Bruno is often supposed to be someone who was executed by the Roman Catholic Church because of his belief in the heliocentric theory of the solar system. This is not correct: He favored the Copernican system because it agreed with the theological beliefs he had come to hold for other reasons. Those beliefs, rather than Copernicanism, appear to be the basis of his conviction for heresy in 1600. Copernicanism was not condemned as a result of his trial, and, in fact, the RC Church did not address the subject until 1616. For more details see The Folly of Giordano Bruno.
In the days of Robert Maynard Hutchins and the Great Books program it was described as a Baptist school where atheist professors teach Catholic philosophy to Jewish students. Return to index
Colmcille, perhaps better known as St. Columba, was one of the great saints of the Celtic Church. In 561 AD he was staying with Finnian of Moville, who had a copy of a book entitled The Gospel of St. Martin. Colmcille coveted this book and secretly, every night, went down to the library to work on a copy for himself. One night Finnian caught him at it and was furious. The book was his! But to whom did the copy belong? The case ended up before the High King, who as chief judge pronounced in favor of Finnian:
"To every cow belongs her calf, and to every book her son-book."
Colmcille did not accept this judgement. Being of royal descent himself he rallied his clan and started a civil war. This did not go over well with the Irish Church and so Colmcille was excommunicated. A friend of his argued for a reversal of the sentence, and this was granted, with the proviso that Colmcille do penance. The penance was that he become a missionary to what is now Scotland. This he did, founding a monastery at Iona and leading missions to the pagan Picts. He became one of the greatest of the Celtic Saints.
From Peter Berrisford Ellis, Celtic Inheritance. Return to index
A few years ago one of my coworkers (I was then a computer programmer at a large Chicago bank) gave us all xeroxes of St. Dogbert saying
"Out Out!! You demons of stupidity!!"
Shortly after that I was visited by one of our corporate EDP Auditors. She interviewed me about a small VAX-based system for which was I responsible. She was well trained in 1970's mainframe technology and insisted on describing my system in the terms of that age.
Afterwards I said to my colleague: "Cheryl, about that St. Dogbert icon: It didn't work". Return to index
According to the Calendar FAQ, the calculation of Easter in the East is based on the Julian calendar, while the Western churches use the Gregorian. Among other things, this means the Julian calendar uses a less accurate calculation of the full moon. I think both use an assumed date of March 21 for the Vernal equinox, which is now way off for the Julian calendar.
The Gregorian algorithm also uses a calculated full moon which can vary from the real full moon by a day or two. The reason for these approximations is that a really good calculation of the Moon's motion is a difficult problem in celestial mechanics. It defeated Newton, and was first accurately solved by Charles Eugene Delaunay in the 1860's. He needed two volumes to publish the calculations in La Théorie du mouvement de la lune. With modern computers it is a lot easier to calculate the Moon's motion accurately, hence the Aleppo meeting on revising the method for calculating the date of Easter.
Church A and Church B recognize each other, and also Church B and Church C come to a similar understanding. It is tempting to say that the mutual recognition extends between A and C. This need not necessarily be true, and is not here, as far as ECUSA is concerned.
To put it in mathematical terms, ecumenical agreements are not transitive. Return to index
This term gets used rather freely, when in fact it has a very specific meaning. Around the turn of the last century, in response to the liberal Christianity of the day, some conservative Christians outlined the "Fundamentals" of the faith. The exact list varies somewhat in wording, but is alway close to:
"Fundamentalism", Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. 9, 1965, p. 1009. Return to index
There is no such thing as too much garlic! Return to index
The particle/anti-particle pair that is created in the Hawking process has a total energy that is positive. The rest energy of an anti-particle is positive, just like that of an ordinary particle. Hence when either the particle or the anti-particle escapes, there is a net loss of energy, which must come out of the total energy of the black hole. Return to index
Einstein discovered the equations of General Relativity. Mathematically the solution he found implied that the universe was expanding. He could not accept this, and so modified the equations to allow for a universe that (on a sufficiently large scale) was eternal and unchanging.
The Belgian priest George LeMaitre was willing to consider the possibility of a changing universe, and studied the solutions of general relativity that allowed for it. Since he considered the possibility that the universe might have had an origin, and thought about what matter would have been like near that time, you can certainly say his work led to the big bang theory.
Many of Lemaitre's results were independently obtained by the Soviet mathematicial Alexander Friedmann at about the same. The results are often still known as Friedmann-Lemaitre Universes.
The observational discovery of the expansion of the Universe, by Slipher and Hubble, show that Einstein's hope for a static eternal universe was going to be disappointed. However, this discovery was perfectly consistent with the F-L universes. Einstein later described the Cosmological Constant as his biggest mistake. It certainly caused him to miss the chance to predict the expansion of the universe.
Later scientific work, including Gamow's big bank theory and Guth's Inflational cosmology is still based on the Friedmann-LeMaitre universes. It seems that our universe is in fact one of the F-L universes, but we don't know which one. Current observations have not clearly answered the question of whether the universe will expand for ever or recollapse in a "big crunch", although recent (1998) reports favor the perpetual expansion. Both possibilities were considered by LeMaitre. Return to index
Dom Gregory Dix, in The Shape of the Liturgy, noted that it was quite possible to have a lot of eucharistic ceremonial and a thoroughly Protestant theology, citing the Church of Sweden as an example. He made a distinction between "protestant" and "puritan" worship. He also said the converse was possible; that a very simple eucharist could be perfectly Catholic. Return to index
Many 17th century mathematicians were members of the clergy. In England there was Henry Gellibrand, (log and trig tables), John Wilkins (mathematical astronomy), John Wallis(calculus), and Isaac Barrow (calculus). Many more examples could be added from the European continent. Return to index or to Religion and Science page or to Mathematics page.
I first saw the Cathedral in 1993. Mia and I were taking our autistic son Thomas to a specialist in Bethesda. It was during our darkest period of dealing with his disability. As we were flying into National Airport I looked out the window and there the Cathedral was! We had talked about seeing it but I had not thought it would be instantly visible from an airplane (I had not been to DC since 1959).
After renting a car, and figuring out how to get to Bethesda, we realized we might actually have a little time before the appointment. Then we looked at the map and saw that the Cathedral was on our route. It could not have been easier for strangers to the city (like us) to find. So we stopped and visited it for a while. It was exactly what we needed to encourage and strengthen us at the time. I will always think of the Cathedral as a sign of God's presence when we were most in need. Return to index
To be more specific, the initial singularity of the expanding universe is not the same as a black hole. Black holes are not the only possible singularities in general relativity. The mathematical descriptions of a black hole and the universe are quite different. See the Physics FAQ for more details. Return to index
Martin Gardner has a good rebuttal in Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, originally published in the 1950's and (I think) still available as a Dover paperback. Return to index
Raymond Brown discussed the notion that the story of the virginal conception was inspired by Greco-Roman myths in The Birth of the Messiah. He argued, to my mind convincingly, that this was not plausible. See Appendix IV (I think) of BOTM. Return to index
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