WBUR's On Point host Jane Clayson: Science and faith aren't at war with each other, says renowned Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant. They're just in different parts of the brain. We're hardwired for faith, hope, love and joy, Vaillant says. There's...
A profile of the Carmelite mystic, writer and reformer from Trinity Television and New Media.
Independence and interdependence
The Feast of St. Benedict falls every year on the 11th of July, exactly a week after the 4th of July, our Independence Day. In some ways, one could make the case that these two commemorations stand for opposite values. Independence Day is about shaking off tyrannical authority, for self-determination, for freedom. St. Benedict, on the other hand, stresses the dependence of the monk on his community, and the rootedness to be found in one place until death.
Thomas Jefferson epitomized what it meant in America to be a man of the Enlightenment. At his estate of Monticello, he displayed busts of Bacon, Locke, and Newton. Incredibly broad in interests and abilities, Jefferson was sufficiently interested in religious matters that one scholar has described him as “the most self-consciously theological of all America’s presidents.”
