The Faust motif provides an opportunity to explore the spectrum of attitudes among Christians toward science and technology by placing them into a historic context. Depending on one's understanding of the relationship of God and the world, the accomplishments of a Leonardo, a Paracelsus, a Faust, an Oppenheimer, or some future scientist credited with the “production” of the first successfully cloned human being can be interpreted as divine or diabolic in origin. I use the example of Faust to demonstrate that (...) the Christian assessment of the scientific enterprise is closely correlated to the level of doctrinaire dualism informing the particular version of Christianity that inspires the assessment. I show that, contrary to what seems obvious, Faust's damnation originated not in medieval times but in early modern northern Europe, reflecting a dualistic obsession with human sinfulness more characteristic of Reformation Germany than of Renaissance Italy. Encouraged by hellfire‐and‐brimstone preachers, the common folk saw demons, devils, and witches in every dark corner, while humanist scholars sought to recapture the brilliant past of the Greeks and the Romans. Goethe's interpretation represents a return to earlier versions of the story, while some continue to accuse contemporary Faustians of Satanic connections for seeking forbidden knowledge and daring to play God by manipulating the stuff of life. (shrink)

Two theme–setting quotations introduce this essay—that of Yeats's falcon, deaf to the falconer's call, adrift in space above the blood–dimmed tide, counterpoised to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's call to abandon old nationalistic prejudices and build the earth. With primary references to the thought of Teilhard, along with, among others, to Ewert Cousins, Andrew M. Greeley, Karl Jaspers, Marshall McLuhan, Ilya Prigogine, Karl Rahner, Leonard Swidler, David Tracy, and Alfred North Whitehead, I argue that the most crucial intellectual paradigm shift of (...) the twenty–first century will challenge humanity to take the turn from uncritical attachment to rigid absolutism or atomistic fragmentation toward a sense of open–ended, off–centered centeredness and fluid connections—from a static to a dynamic model of reality. Central to my argument is the Teilhardian reinterpretation of the Christian metaphors of creation, fall, incarnation, salvation, and the eschaton in the evolutionary terms of the emergence of cosmic consciousness from the chrysalis of the world of the past—from chaos to order, from biosphere via noosphere to theosphere. Facilitated by the exponential growth of populations, collaborative research, science, technology, and global communication (most dramatically manifested by the Internet), this emergent understanding of what it means to be human can, first, foster the awareness that in humanity evolution has become conscious of itself, and then, gradually, precipitate the formation of “the global village” (the mystical body of Christ), as respectful dialogue replaces diatribe and the dualistic pugilism of Samuel Huntington's “Clash of Civilizations” is gradually transformed into a nonadversarial mentality that values shared humanity and a common purpose. Thus, eons hence, empowered by love–energy, the transmutation of the human into the ultra–human can take the ultimate quantum leap into a yet higher dimension where spirit/energy is no longer in need of flesh/mass, and Earth can be safely left behind. (shrink)

Drawing on philosophy, theology, comparative religion, spirituality, Holocaust studies, physics, biology, psychology, and personal experience, I argue that continued human existence depends on our willingness to reject nihilism–not as an expedient “noble lie” but because faith in a meaningful cosmos and the power of love is at least as validly grounded in human experience as insistence on cosmic indifference and ultimate futility. I maintain that hope will free us to develop nonimperialistic methods of bridging cultural differences by forming a mutually (...) intelligible vocabulary that celebrates diversity, enters the worlds of others in respectful dialogue, and fosters a postmechanistic, organic, ecological, holistic, dynamic, interactive, open‐ended model of reality. I lay the foundation for a “hermeneutics of love” to complement Paul Ricoeur's “hermeneutics of suspicion” and invite speculation on the ways science, technology, and society would be transformed if those “glasses of friendship” were widely applied. (shrink)

This article explores a rarely acknowledged and all too often specifically denied possibility: the relevance of Hegel’s philosophy to the interpretation of the literary work of Hermann Hesse. Contemporary Hesse scholars critical of this position, such as Edmund Gnefkow, Martin Pfeifer, and Mark Boulby, tend to view Hegel primarily as a rigorously rationalist philosopher of history. Thus they perpetuate a myth which has long been abandoned by the mainstream of Hegelian scholarship and should have been permanently laid to rest by (...) Iwan Iljin in Die Philosophie Hegels als kontemplative Gotteslehre when he presented convincing evidence for considering Hegel as an “intuitively-rational clairvoyant”. (shrink)

A philosopher‐poet‐theologian ponders the implications of the multimillion‐year biogenetic process that produced Homo sapiensand is beginning to reveal itself ever more clearly as evolution of the mind and consciousness. As meaning trappers and makers, called to actualize the divine image imprinted upon us, we are now facing biological and cultural evolution with deliberate human input as well as the evolution of evolution. As communicating animals that are becoming ever more aware of our adaptive behavior, we have the potential of affecting (...) our own destiny by listening to the spirit within and nurturing the genes and memes that give rise to physical, intellectual, creative, and moral excellence. In the matrix of cyberspace we have the opportunity to heal the two‐culture split, to reinvent ourselves, to incubate/weave the emergent religions of the future, and to create our multiple “Ways” appropriate to the dawning Age of Global Dialogue. (shrink)