November 12, 2011

On Saturday, November 12, Abbot James was one of four speakers at a conference sponsored by the Washington Theological Consortium and funded by the Templeton Foundation. This was the first of four conferences that will be held on various issues in the field of science-and-religion and that are intended to help persons active in pastoral ministry deal with these issues in their own work. Held in the library of the Washington Theological Union and attended by an overflow crowd of about 140 persons, this first conference had as its theme “The Origin of the Universe.” Two of the speakers, Dr. Stephen Barr, a physicist at the University of Delaware, and Dr. Sten Odenwald, an astronomer at NASA, dealt with the topic from the perspective of contemporary science, while Abbot James and his Catholic University colleague Dr. Robert Miller approached the topic as theologians. All four talks are expected to be available on the website atompluseve.com by the beginning of December. The second conference, on “The Origin of Life and Its Development,” is scheduled for April 14, 2012. Registration for that conference may already be made on that website.