Big Questions Online

Rod Dreher, one of my all-time favorite bloggers, recently took a job as the editor of the Templeton Foundation’s new webzine, Big Questions Online . The new site “aims to ask and explore the Big Questions of human purpose and ultimate reality, with a focus on science, religion, markets, morals, and the dynamic intersection among them.”

Although it only came out a few days ago, BQO already has a number of articles that will be of interest to readers of First Things . For example:

David Hart’s reviews Marilynne Robinson’s book about science and religion :

Robinson’s central argument is, I think it fair to say, more or less indisputable — or, at least, it should be. It may be fashionable in certain circles, and very desirable for ideological reasons, to insist that our normal experience of consciousness is in some sense an illusion, begotten by one or another set of pre-conscious, purely material forces, which have merely dissembled themselves as personal motives, transcendental aspirations, moral principles, altruism, and so on. And it may well be the case that the “discourses of suspicion” that make these claims have spread wide enough through popular culture to have become a kind of tacit cultural orthodoxy. But, as Robinson acutely observes, there is one great problem that bedevils all the magisterial reductionist approaches to the mind, whether they be sociobiological, neurobiological, psychological, economic, or what have you: simply enough, all of them consistently prove extravagantly inadequate to what any scrupulous, unprejudiced examination of the complexity of consciousness actually reveals.

Roger Scruton says Muhammad was right about debt :

Everybody has an opinion about what we ought to do to fix our dreadful financial situation. Here’s a thought: why not listen to Muhammad? True, the Prophet did not hold an economics degree, nor was he a fixture on noisy cable chat shows about finance. Times have changed since the seventh century. But Muhammad knew a thing or two about human nature, which has not changed.

Susan Jacoby, a non-believer, writes about the potential clash between Catholic religious liberty and her ailing mother’s end-of-life-care wishes :

In spite of the advance planning for which my mother is legendary, she might be in real trouble if she were unfortunate enough to be taken in an unconscious state to an emergency room at a Roman Catholic hospital. The moral values of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops — not her own values — could dictate her care.

Alan Jacobs examines Apple CEO Steve Jobs as Shaman and Sorcerer :

Today’s computer user, faced with the firehose of information and images from the internet, is often in that situation of terrifying solitude, confronted with awesome, inscrutable power and unable even to imagine how it could be managed. To this individual Steve Jobs comes bearing the iPad, an instrument which, he has said and Apple’s marketing people have also said, is uniquely “magical.”

This is but a sampling of the interesting content on hand at this intriguing project. Be sure to bookmark the site and check back often.