Fr. Jaki Roundup

Last week I told you about the passing of Fr. Stanley L. Jaki. Eventually I will have to post something more in-depth about the man and his work. But in the meantime, I'll simply link to some recent items about him and highlight the more noteworthy information. This first group is obituaries.

• What Does Prayer Really Say? (April 7)
  a simple announcement, but the comments include a broadcast email from Seton Hall president Monsignor Robert Sheeran
• ISI First Principles (April 7)
• Communio blog (April 8)
• Pertinacious Papist (April 11)
  blog and discussion
• New York Times (April 12)
• Associated Press (April 13)
• Los Angeles Times (April 15)

The Los Angeles Times includes this interesting local detail: "From 1957 to 1960, Jaki lived and worked as bookkeeper at the Woodside Priory, which he co-founded with six other Benedictine priests, in the San Francisco Bay Area town of Portola Valley." The New York Times obituary concludes, "He is survived by two brothers, both Benedictine priests, the Rev. Zeno Jaki and the Rev. Theodose Jaki, who live at the Archabbey of Pannonhalma." So he is being buried at the Archabbey of Pannonhalma, about an hour and a half west of Budapest.¹

There is also a beautiful series of posts at Casa Santa Lidia:

• Father Jaki in Rome (March 30)
  photos from his last Rome visit
• Please Keep Praying for Fr. Jaki (April 7)
  more photos from Rome visit
• Father Stanley Jaki 1924 - 2009 (April 7)
  a couple more excellent photos
• In paradisum deducant te angeli (April 8)
  funeral arrangements
• From the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (April 14)
  memorial letter from Chancellor Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo
• An update (April 16)
  burial arrangements

From which we learn that Fr. Jaki's funeral was at "Monasterio de Nuestra Senora de Montserrat in Madrid (plaza San Bernardo, 79) at 17:00 this evening (Wednesday the 8th April)" and "Father Jaki's body will return to Hungary on Friday [the 17th]. Burial will take place on the 29th April at Pannonhalma, at 14:30 (2:30 p.m.)." (h/t the Blue Boar)

This next group are older items that I include as background:

• His Gifford Lectures (later published as The Road of Science and the Ways to God)
• Absolute Astronomy bio
• His 1996 CV

In the wake of Fr. Jaki's death, the Duhem Society has been founded to study the works of those two great historians of science, Fr. Jaki and Pierre Duhem. (h/t the Curt Jester) One of the more useful posts so far is a list of their works available online.

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Notes

1. A friend has asked for a prayer card. If anyone has one, and would take the trouble to scan and post online, it would be appreciated.

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Update (4/24): Fr. Rutler has a wonderful tribute to Fr. Jaki on Inside Catholic. Yes, Fr. Jaki was a Benedictine, though in the photo he appears to be dressed as a Jesuit. ;o)

Stanley L. Jaki, RIP

I just found out Fr. Jaki died on Tuesday. This definitely represents the passing of an era. From the Seton Hall obituary:

Rev. Stanley L. Jaki, the world-renowned Hungarian-born author, physicist, philosopher and theologian died April 7 in Madrid, following a heart attack. Known as a leading thinker in areas at the boundary of theology and science, Jaki was awarded the Templeton Prize in 1987. He was cited for delineating "the importance of differences as well as similarities between science and religion, adding significant, balanced enlightenment to the field."

He had traveled to Spain from Rome where he had lectured last week on his latest book at the Renaissance-era Casina (Garden House) of Pope Pius IV, headquarters of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, of which he was an honorary member since 1990. He was 84 years old.

More details of his last days are posted on his Wikipedia entry. As mercurial as Wikipedia is, I'll take the liberty of preserving the relevant paragraph here:

Father Jaki died on April 7, 2009, at about 1:15 PM (MET) in the Intensive Care Unit of the Clinica de la Conception in Madrid (Spain). He was in Spain to visit friends on his way back to the USA, after delivering some lectures in Rome, for the Master in Faith and Science of the Pontificio Ateneo Regina Apostolorum. He died from the consequences of a heart attack he suffered (without realizing it) while still in Rome. When he arrived in Madrid on March 27, 2009, he was brought to the hospital almost immediately . He remained fully conscious for two days, but then was sedated for medical reasons; he died without regaining consciousness. Four of his friends were holding his hands and praying for him.¹

I hope he was able to receive Last Rites.

I first met Fr. Jaki when I as an undergraduate hosted a lecture of his in Houston. A detail of that visit that stands out for me is the relish with which he ate the osso bucco he ordered for dinner.

Over the years I attended many of his lectures in NYC and DC, and even hosted a couple of them. He was definitely a decisive intellect: one always knew where he stood on any topic he cared to speak about. He was a voracious reader and a voluminous writer. The Wikipedia page only lists a small fraction of his publications; for the others you'll need to visit the links at the bottom of the entry.

Steve Barr tells me that he posted on the First Things blog on Tuesday. "For many years Fr. Jaki was the only scientist who wrote about science and religion from a Catholic perspective, at least the only one who commanded a wide audience.... Now there are increasing numbers of research scientists who are Catholic and have taken up the pen.... But Fr. Jaki bravely blazed the trail for us. R.I.P."

I haven’t found anything about funeral arrangements (Seton Hall PR Dept is closed for the Triduum, but I left a message and will post any updates here).

Please pray for his eternal repose.

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Update (4/10): Holly Wojcik from Seton Hall was kind enough to return my call yesterday evening. Fr. Jaki's funeral was Wednesday in Spain. He will be buried in Hungary at the monastery where his two brothers (also priests) live.

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Notes

1. The entry for the edit in the article's history page says, "08:15, 8 April 2009 217.127.206.16 (talk) (6,282 bytes) (About his death. The writer was present at the death.)". The IP address is from Madrid. So these details are consistent with what's written.

NYT: Global Warming Enthusiasts Need Not Lose Faith

It's long been noted by those skeptical of the "consensus" on global warming that over the last decade, the Earth's average surface temperature has been more or less flat. The New York Times's Andrew C. Revkin notes a forthcoming peer-reviewed paper that argues that flat temperatures—and indeed even cooling spells—are not incompatible with a larger warming trend.

I'm not sure how much this paper proves. Does it prove so much that its conclusions backfire? Lacking a subscription to the journal, I can't read the article. But it would seem to me that what's sauce for the goose also works for the gander: the converse should also be true: short warming spells should also be compatible with an overall cooling trend. The question then is: how scale-dependent are these relationships? Could a century-long warming spell be compatible with a much larger cooling trend? If they're stochastic in the usual sense, the answer would have to be yes.

In that case, the paper's conclusions are actually a much more powerful weapon in the hands of climate-change skeptics than global-warming believers. The paper's analysis would equally argue that the recent century of warming would provide no good evidence that we're not in the midst of a larger cool trend.

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Take note of the end of the Revkin piece about other efforts he's engaged in to defend the politically correct faith. Read: the failure of rising water levels to materialize shouldn't make you question the reality of an unnaturally warming planet. But somehow, an increasing number of people appear to be questioning the conventional "wisdom."

Linus: [to Sally as she walks away with everyone else] Hey, aren't you going to stay to greet the Great Pumpkin? Huh? It won't be long now. If the Great Pumpkin comes, I'll still put in a good word for you!

Linus: Good grief! I said "if"! I meant, "when" he comes!

Linus: I'm doomed. One little slip like that could cause the Great Pumpkin to pass you by. Oh, Great Pumpkin, where are you?

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Easterling, D. R., and M. F. Wehner (2009), "Is the climate warming or cooling?" Geophys. Res. Lett., doi:10.1029/2009GL037810.

Quotation from It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966).

Seven Deadly Sins of Religion in Science Fiction

"The 7 Deadly Sins Of Religion In Science Fiction" by Charlie Jane Anders gets it just about right.¹ I'll leave it to you to read the column's illustrative examples and entertaining language, but here are the "sins" to which I add a brief explanatory paraphrase:

1. The cargo cult. [Primitive peoples worshiping more advanced technology]
2. The cheap Jesus. [Christ imagery plopped on]
3. The dumb space gods. [Appearances of the Divine should appear divine.]
4. The all-purpose patch for lazy writing. [AKA Deus ex machina ending, i.e., pulling a ending outta "heaven" that's actually thin air]
5. Simplistic religion vs. science battles. [as if a Dawkins drone wrote the script]
6. Simplistic science-bashing in the name of religion. [don't see how this can be clarified briefly]
7. New-agey-ness. [yeah, Boomers should be banned from writing and directing]

Numbers 1-3 might be summarized by "simplistic or caricature religion"—the religious counterpart to number 6's simplistic science. Number 7 might be called simplistic "self-caricature" religion—the real pity of it is that new age practitioners don't recognize what a superficial, ersatz "spirituality" they've fallen for. Number 4 is just plain bad writing, but then these all reflect bad writing. But I most appreciate number 5: it's a point that can't be made too often these days.

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Note

1. My blind spot in commenting on this column is that it jumps off of the Battlestar Galactica series that recently ended, and I've seen exactly zero of the episodes. (Perhaps my lacking a television excuses me.)

Live, Online Bioethics Debate

I thought you might be interested in participating in this debate taking place this week at The Economist.

CONTEST: Name this Creature

Let me describe a hypothetical creature, a thought experiment to clarify the distinction between a machine and an organism, and perhaps you can come up with a name for it. It is based on the observation that flames share certain characteristics with living things: they have a “hunger” for food or fuel, and in some sense, they are constituted by what they consume. So why can’t we harness these characteristics to make a “living” machine?

Presumably we'd construct from metal, or from some sort of non-flammable material a body for our creature, something that houses the flames and channels them to create reactions more characteristic of an organism.

CONTEST QUESTION: What name would best capture the essence of this creature?

Also, I'd appreciate hearing you explain why this creature would NOT be living. What separates it from organisms?

Please submit your answers in comments to this post. Winners get special honors announced in a future post. I know nobody reads this blog, so maybe I'll set a deadline of one month, maybe two weeks if by some miracle I get a lot of good responses. We'll see how it goes....

Note: the photo of a mechanical soldier from Hellboy II: The Golden Army is just for interest. I'd be surprised if the creature I'm describing was what Guillermo del Toro had in mind, but images from the film did help me come up with this idea.

The Times Gets It Right!

At long last, an honest news analysis from the New York Times:

Members of Congress and advocates for fighting diseases have long spoken of human embryonic stem cell research as if it were a sure avenue to quick cures for intractable afflictions. Scientists have not publicly objected to such high-flown hopes, which have helped fuel new sources of grant money like the $3 billion initiative in California for stem cell research.

In private, however, many researchers have projected much more modest goals for embryonic stem cells. Their chief interest is to derive embryonic stem cell lines from patients with specific diseases, and by tracking the cells in the test tube to develop basic knowledge about how the disease develops.

...Embryonic stem cells have their drawbacks. They cause tumors, and the adult cells derived from them may be rejected by the patient’s immune system. Furthermore, whatever disease process caused the patients’ tissue cells to die is likely to kill introduced cells as well. All these problems may be solvable, but so far none have been solved.

Of course in the final paragraph, the author has to swear allegiance to the PC orthodoxy of the (ultimate) efficacy of embryonic stem cells. But other than that, this is a refreshingly honest analysis from the Times. I encourage them to do more of it.

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Nicholas Wade, "Rethink Stem Cells? Science Already Has," New York Times (March 9, 2009).