“how to go to Heaven, and not how the heavens go”
“Spiritui Sancto mentem fuisse nos docere quomodo ad coelum eatur, non quomodo coelum gradiatur ”
Galileo Galilei, attributed to Cesare Baronius, in Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany (1615)
Photo by Davide Cantelli on Unsplash
In May of 2023 I obtained my PhD in Environmental Studies. My technical focus is on climate change and technology. In this substack I put my ideas out there in bitesize pieces - both deep reads on science, technology, policy, environment and religion as well as commentary on emerging trends and news.
My academic expertise is on the intersection of ‘Catholic philosophy, theology and secular environmental issues’, also the title of my doctoral dissertation, which will become a book to celebrate the 800th centenary of St. Francis of Assisi.
Galileo’s Ghost - I explain the title of this publication below - is where my dissertation took me: science, cosmology and its relationship to ecology, technology, policy, economics, politics, history, religion and culture. If this sounds like a lot, it is! But I’m interested in reality, which today requires both a sophisticated understanding and simple articulation of numerous forms of knowledge.
Why “Galileo’s Ghost”
The ghost of Galileo still haunts the Catholic Church, and more broadly, institutions struggling to adapt to technological and communications transitions. Galileo Galilei is both a scientist unjustly condemned and a symbol for the conflicts between modernity and tradition, science and religion, (new) knowledge and (institutional) power.
In 1981, 365 years since Galileo’s first official reprimand in 1616, Pope John Paul II created the Galileo Commission to wrestle with the enduring controversy, which ended in a 1992 address that failed to dispel the “myth” of the conflict between faith and science (and for the same reasons it came about in the first place, according to Fr. George Coyne, Vatican astronomer and Commission member). The Church’s half apology was a lesson only partly learned.
Today, Galileo’s ghost haunts everyone. Institutional leaders would be wise to pay attention to the technical details of scientific and technological transformations in relation to philosophical, theological, cultural and social trends, lest they end up on the wrong side of history. This includes Facebook, Google and other tech companies and their heavy handed defense of section 230 of internet law, businesses dealing with the great resignation and work from home policies, media companies and individuals exposed by the “me too” movement, Uber/Lyft’s labor and safety abuses, religious institutions crushed by sexual abuse crisis and even democracy itself. All of these ‘crises’ are only possible with modern communication in the Information Age.
But ‘ghost’ also alludes to the supernatural dimension of reality, that not everything can be explained by economic and sociological analysis. I take religion, theology and philosophy (especially questions about the problem of evil, metaphysics, ethics and epistemology) very seriously. I am particularly interested in the work of Henri de Lubac (and Ressourcement more broadly), Joseph Ratzinger, Romano Guardini, Augusto del Noce, Jurgen Habermas, American Pragmatism, Pope Francis and Alberto Methol Ferré. ‘Ghost’ also points to the Holy Ghost , essential for understanding Catholic theology, ecclesiology and a biblical worldview.
I’ve studied climate change for over 15 years, also the topic of my published thesis “Truth and Climate Change” which focused on climate science, American pragmatism, Jurgen Habermas and Jospeh Ratzinger. I’ve written about sport events and environmental impact and researched laboratory meat and the future of food. I look for conflict and controversy and focus on policy problems. Methodologically, I use the Policy Sciences as a focusing lens to identify issues of public interest and propose solutions.
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