I am fascinated by the way accounts of people lost and alone at sea tap into a unique complex of deep human fears of abandonment and isolation, the unknown future and unseen dangers, and the prospect of slow, painful death. Reflecting on them has prompted the question more than once: What of all those biblical
Part 1 of 2 is here. A sketch of some conclusions from my month at the Center: 1. The prevailing narrative for explaining the transition from pre- to post-Enlightenment thought and culture is a story of maturing from ignorance to knowledge and, even more condescendingly, myth to science. Particularly when it comes to shifting perspectives on
The conventional story of the decline of hell in the modern world points out the seismic shift from a premodern and "unscientific" to modern and "scientific" cosmology in the seventeenth century. But is it as simple as that, and was such a decline in fact rendered inevitable by the rise of the natural sciences? By