Teilhard de Chardin believed that thinking is essential to evolution. How we think is how we evolve because thinking is the act of the mind creating new unities and new horizons of insight.
To think is to unify, to make wholes where there are scattered fragments; not merely to register it but to confer upon it a form of unity it would otherwise be without.
– PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN
As you engage with the Omega Center we encourage you to read and apply Ilia Delio’s instruction: READING FOR AN EVOLUTIONARY AGE: OMEGA LECTIO DIVINA.
In Support of Teilhard’s Vision
by Ilia Delio
The great medievalist scholar Etienne Gilson once wrote of Bonaventure: “You can either see the general economy of his doctrine in its totality, or see none of it, nor would a historian be led by the understanding of one of the fragments to desire to understand the whole, for the fragments are quite literally meaningless by themselves, since each part reaches out into all the rest of the system and is affected by the ramifications leading to it from the synthesis as a whole” (The Philosophy of St. Bonaventure, 436). What Gilson wrote of Bonaventure could also be said of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who saw himself in the lineage of the Greek Fathers of the early Church.
Trashing Teilhard
by John F Haught
Was the Jesuit scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin really a fascist, racist, genocidal opponent of human dignity? I had thought that, at least among educated Catholics, the question was almost dead. I was even guessing that holdout pockets of hostility might be vanishing for good after several recent Popes favorably cited Teilhard’s cosmic vision for its theological beauty and Eucharist power.I guess my optimism was premature. In a recent article likely to gain momentum on social media, the tired old accusation of Teilhard’s complicity in the spreading of evil has come roaring out of the gates again.
GOD AND THE NEW SCIENCE
by Fr. Thomas Keating
The striking discoveries of contemporary science are continually telling us new things about how material creation came to be and how it continues to evolve. Although we do not have all the answers, we are clearly going in a direction that transcends the cosmology in which the great world religions came into existence. Our vision, understanding, and our attitudes about God inevitably must change.
With this new information, many people, especially scientists, are uneasy with certain scriptural passages. They were written in a cosmological consciousness that is no longer possible to accept from a scientific viewpoint. This alerts us to the fact that we are living in a period of time that is axiomatic; that is, it is shifting into a state of awareness that will deeply affect our own consciousness and eventually the global community itself.
Are We Cyborgs?
by Ilia Delio, OSF
The cyborg symbolizes the extension of nature into new forms. Cyborgs indicate that the old mechanistic framework is giving way to something new. They destabilize our fixed understandings of nature because the cyborg has as much affinity with technology as it does with wilderness.
Cyborgs, therefore, are hybrid entities that are neither wholly technology nor completely biological and have the potential not only to disrupt persistent dualisms but also to refashion our thinking about the theoretical understanding of the body as a material entity and a discursive process.
A New People for a New World: Further Reflections on Christmas
by Ilia Delio, OSF
As we ponder the meaning of birth and new life this Christmas, consider the radicality of divine love—boundary crossing, trans-human love—a love not focused on sin but a singularity of love that can heal all wounds if it becomes our love with a radical openness to new life.
Jesus of Nazareth was, for all practical purposes, a “trans-human.” He shattered the limits of Jewish law and ritual through a deep conscious awareness of God Omega and created a new form of community centered on the dynamic presence of God’s in-dwelling love. Jesus spoke of a new kin-dom or family of brothers and sisters united in a new set of values and a new code of ethics centered on forgiveness and reconciliation.
Radical Incarnation: A Christmas Appeal
by Ilia Delio, OSF
We are once again in the season of waiting—patient waiting—a virtue the consumer culture has abandoned. However, we are not waiting for something but for someone; we are waiting for God to arrive in the person of Jesus Christ.
But wait—didn’t God already come in the birth of Jesus? Isn’t this the heart of Christmas? So what are we waiting for? When I ask this question to different people, I often get the same bewildered look that says “I don’t know what I am waiting for.” We have an ontological gap in our faith. We believe but we are not quite sure what we believe—because if we truly believe what we say we believe as Christians, we would have a very different world.
Evolution and Radical Love
by Ilia Delio, OSF
Many people ask, why is it necessary to pay attention to science? What does religion have to do with science? It is startling to read that, according to a recent Gallup poll, less than forty percent of the American public is familiar with the basics of modern science. To the popular mind, science is completely inimical to religion: science embraces facts and evidence while religion professes faith in God. However, the Christian faith contains deep truths with philosophical consequences that make conceivable the mind’s exploration of nature, including the human’s place in creation, the revealing nature of God and the ways in which God freely creates.
Can A Thinking Heart Make Us Whole?
by Ilia Delio, OSF
The volatility of the news is a good indicator of the unstable forces that are impacting our world today. A drop of 850 points on the NASDAQ and it seems like we are treading on a global land mine. Be careful where you walk or what button you push–you may lose everything. The recent sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church has destabilized the credibility of the Church and perhaps made faith in a loving God ever the more fragile. Who can we trust? How are we to think in these troubled times and, more so, what are we to think about? What should we hope for?
A Welcome Address From The New Executive Director
by Gregory Hansell
Greetings! I am Gregory Hansell, the new and first Executive Director of the Omega Center. I’m honored and thrilled to join you all at this exciting and crucial moment for both the Center and our divisive world. So let me say first “Thank you!” to Ilia, the Omega Center board and team, and all of you who have already welcomed me so graciously and kindly. This is a time of great progress at the Omega Center and considerable foment on our troubled planet. I believe Ilia Delio’s profound vision of wholeness—the bridging of science and spirituality, world religions, and contemplative knowing within the grand cosmic deepening of divine love and consciousness—can help heal our world and lead us to a new era of spiritual celebration and human flourishing.
The Boundless Body Of Christ
by Br. Ivan Nicoletto, OSB Cam
With a myriad of terrestrial living beings we are one aspiring flesh, which wants to keep itself alive, which is moved by the same striving for fulfillment and wholeness. With them we share the same hunger and thirst to thrive, to enjoy, to grow, to communicate, and to feel. We are inhabited and moved by desires as the primordial expressions of the flesh of the world.
Desire tells us that we are not only propelled by primary needs such as food, housing, clothing, or things we can possess, manage, and define. We are driven by a desire beyond desire that shines in an amazing way in the life of Jesus Christ.
CHURCH AS AN EVOLVING LIFE-SYSTEM: BOTTOM-UP AS WELL AS TOP-DOWN ORGANIZATION
by Fr. Joe Bracken
“Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church” (Mt. 18:16). Throughout most of its long institutional history, the Roman Catholic Church has prided itself on the stability of its mode of operation. Decisions by and large have been made from the top-down: from the Pope and Vatican officials to the regional bishop with his staff and finally to the pastor of the local parish and his staff in dealing with individual parishioners. This hierarchically ordered structure of authority guarantees fidelity to Church tradition, a sense of corporate unity here and now, and a stable outlook for the future.RECONSTRUCTING WHOLENESS
by ED BACON
Transgender experiences are teaching us a great deal when we have learning hearts. I deeply appreciate the reality that our transgender siblings in the human family share about being “assigned” one binary identity that doesn’t match one’s inner reality. That one profound facet of the transgender journey has helped me understand the “trans” nature of my own theological, spiritual, and religious narrative. Being assigned one identity when your inner reality is quite different also sheds light on why I felt compelled to attend the first Omega Center national conference in Kansas City in July.
SCHISM OR EVOLUTION?
by ILIA DELIO
Something momentous is happening in our midst. The concerted efforts to oust Pope Francis are deeply tied to the perverted crisis of abuse embedded in ecclesiastical power structures. While some may spiritually rely on Julian of Norwich’s “all shall be well”, the fact is, all is not well and will not be well unless the Church undergoes a deconstruction of power and authority and a reconstruction along new lines of inclusivity and integrated systems.
DEATH IN THE CHURCH: IS NEW LIFE AHEAD?
by ILIA DELIO
The recent disclosure of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and the extent of depravity reported in the news is symptomatic of a Church in crisis. It is no longer acceptable for the Pope simply to issue a public apology nor is it sufficient for any group merely to reflect on what has happened by issuing position statements. The Church has a deep structural problem which is entirely bound to ancient metaphysical and philosophical principles, not to mention imperial politics, that at this point require either a radical decision towards a new ecclesial structure or accept the possibility of a major schism. The rock-solid Church has crushed human souls and twisted authority into deceit. The male-dominated Christ center no longer holds and there is simply no solution or comforting words that can placate the extensive damage to fragile human lives that has taken place over the past decades. The evidence of abuse brought to light in the Catholic Church is simply unfathomable.
TEILHARD DE CHARDIN AND THE THREE FACES OF GOD
by PAUL SMITH
I offer Teilhard’s evolved Three Faces of God for your own understanding and spiritual practice in whatever forms fit for you. I especially encourage my postmodern readers to not lose Jesus in the glory of the Cosmic Christ or dismiss a personal friendship with the spiritual presence of the Risen Jesus. Christianity was born out of friendship with Jesus, first in his historical physical body with a few others, and now in his risen spiritual body with all who would enter that transforming friendship. We need a God that is big enough for our minds, close enough for our hearts, and us enough for our deepest identification.
OMEGA CONFERENCE: TOWARDS A PLANETARY FAITH
by ILIA DELIO
I just returned from a wonderful five-day retreat at San Alfonso Retreat House in Long Branch New Jersey. It is always a special time of the year because it is a “Sisters Retreat,” that is, a retreat especially designed for religious women, replete with adoration, daily Mass and morning and evening prayer. Basically the retreat follows the daily convent schedule: Matins, Vespers, Mass and afternoon adoration. This year the theme was “Living from the Heart” and the 137 Sisters gathered from various congregations reflected on the spiritual meaning of the heart.
TOWARDS A RENEWAL OF THE WHOLE
by ILIA DELIO
We are living on a fragile planet right now. The forces of resistance are felt all around us as we seek to hold on to our personal wealth, privileged security, political freedom and religious beliefs. But the structures that gave rise to these systems are giving way to something new, a type of interconnectedness that is less bounded, more open, informationally-driven and global in scope. Teilhard de Chardin envisioned a new paradigm at the dawn of the twentieth century and framed the new paradigm along the lines of evolution.
TEILHARD DE CHARDIN: A BIG THINKER FOR A BIG UNIVERSE
by ILIA DELIO
Teilhard was such a broad, integrated thinker that you either see the economy of the whole of his thought or none of it. Like the early Greek Fathers, he developed a cosmic Christology based on natural philosophy (science), Scripture (especially the writings of St. Paul) and faith in Jesus Christ. His theological vision emerged out of a deep, prayerful reflection on the dynamic relationship of God and world with an understanding of evolution beyond Darwinian natural selection. According to Teilhard, evolution and creation, cosmos and the history of salvation are not contrasts but complementary aspects of the one process of reality.
BOUNDARIES, BARK, AND INCARNATION
by MATTHEW WRIGHT
The boundaries are gone. We may not have all realized it yet, but they’ve dissolved right in front of us. Certainly, many of us—maybe most of us—are playing as if the old lines were still there, fighting to honor our past divisions. But the truth is, they’re gone. As Brie Stoner pointed out in her last blog post, for those of us who grew up with the internet—that is, who grew up watching the internet grow up—the old lines just don’t make sense anymore.
CHRIST THE O.I. (ORIGINATING INTELLIGENCE)
by BRIE STONER
I’d like to build on Ilia’s latest blog describing the need for Christianity to become a planetary faith. But first: let me share a little about myself and why this, the cause of the Universal Christ, is of such great import to me.
I am on the older first wave of millennials. Born in 1982, I grew up with the advent of the internet, and barely am able to recall a reality in which computers did not exist in the home. My childhood occurred overseas while my parents faithfully served as Baptist missionaries to Catholic Spain.
WHY WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT CHRISTIANITY AS PLANETARY FAITH
by ILIA DELIO
Several weeks ago I met my first real Teilhard opponent. She was a religion scholar from Indiana University and was quite adamant that Teilhard was a naïve optimist with a radical anthropocentrism. His vision, she claimed, was ultimately harmful to a committed ecological presence. I was a bit shocked by the gross misinterpretation of Teilhard and though I tried to offer a more balanced understanding of his vision, she was clearly opposed to it. She had her own narrative on ecological wholeness and Teilhard simply did not fit in. And then it dawned on me. We are living together with a multiplicity of narratives, side by side, sharing conference space and coffee cups, assuming that the next person sees the world as I do, until we start to talk.
EASTER MESSAGE: FAITH-SHAKING RESURRECTION
by ILIA DELIO
The celebration of Easter marks the most incredible event in this history of the cosmos summed up in a brief acclamation: “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” Jesus rises from the dead and returns to empower his disciples with a new energy and a new direction: Go out to the whole world and proclaim the Good News (Mark 16:15). What is the power of the risen Christ in an evolutionary universe? What does this power mean for the human community, the earth, and the universe itself?
A HUNGER FOR WHOLENESS
by ILIA DELIO
We have the capacity to wrap the Earth with a new mantle of compassionate love and peace. But do we have the vision? Can we imagine a new world rising up from the ashes of the old? Teilhard’s vision of planetization and ultrahumanism is not a naïve optimism; it is born out of suffering love, a conviction that God is in the midst of our darkness, and that divine light is shining through the unknown of our fears. God will not tell us what to become but God asks us, What do you want to become?
CREATING HARMONY BETWEEN BIBLICAL FAITH AND SCIENCE
an audio interview with DEBORAH HAARSMA
In this Omega Center interview Brie Stoner invites BioLogos President Deborah Haarsma to share her work, perspectives, and passion on a range of topics, including how we can engage in fruitful and open dialogue with Christians who differ in their approach and beliefs of an evolutionary universe.
BEYOND PATRIARCHY AND GENDER: TOWARDS PERSONHOOD
by ILIA DELIO
I was raised in a matriarchal household by a Sicilian mother who was a staunch feminist long before the term was in vogue. I was taught from an early age that I could achieve anything with hard work and determination. My mother was an advocate for the poor and disenfranchised and did not hesitate to confront male authority on issues of justice and fairness. At five-foot two, she was a fearless stick of dynamite whose laser beam words could easily crush the male ego or leave one in the dust. I sometimes feared for her life because she herself was so completely fearless; and yet when I reflect on her life I know where my own power and determination were born.