Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion

SYNOPSIS

In this excellent introduction to the contemporary debate between science and religion, Barbara Brown Taylor describes her own journey as a preacher who is trying to learn what the insights of quantum physics, the new biology, and chaos theory can teach the believer. She seeks to discover why scientists sometimes sound like poets and why physicists may use the language of imagination, ambiguity, and mystery, just as scripture does. Taylor invites us to discover these new insights along with her, and gives us a map and a compass to see these wonders for ourselves. In explaining why the church should care about the new discoveries and insights of the physical world, Taylor suggests ways we might close the gap between spirit and matter, between the secular and the sacred. For we live in the midst of a "web of creation" where nothing is without consequence and where all things coexist in such a way that each of us by our very existence changes the world, whether we know it or not. In this "luminous web" faith and science join on a single path, seeking to learn the same truths about life in the universe. "For a moment," she writes, "we see through a glass darkly. We live in the illusion that we are all separate 'I ams.' When the fog finally clears, we shall know there is only One."

About The Author
Barbara Brown Taylor is an Episcopal priest and former rector of Grace-Calvary Episcopal Church in Clarkesville, Georgia. She currently holds the Harry R. Butman Chair in Religion and Philosophy at Piedmont College in Demorest, Georgia. A popular preacher, speaker, and workshop leader, she was recently noted in Newsweek as one of the twelve most effective preachers in the English language.

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