June 2018 Newsletter
In this Clergy Letter Project update, you’ll find the following six items:
- The Clergy Letter Project’s Stance on Separating Immigrant Children from their Families;
- Astrobiology News for June 2018: Learning from Mars: Habitability Over Time;
- How Scientific Questioning Impacts Faith;
- Creationism in Florida;
- One Evangelical’s Journey Toward Scientific Understanding; and
- Evolution Weekend 2019.
1. The Clergy Letter Project’s Stance on Separating Immigrant Children from their Families
First and foremost, I want to thank the many hundreds of you who voted on whether or not The Clergy Letter Project should take a public stance against the policy of separating children from their families. 92% of those voting favored taking a public position. Many who commented, on both sides of the issue wanted to be sure that if we did take a position it was based on the interrelationship between religion and science.
In keeping with the vote and that advice, I wrote an essay outlining The Clergy Letter Project’s position. I hope you approve of what I’ve written and, if you do, please share it broadly.
The article provides a link to many of the wonderful comments you so generously shared with me. I did my best to sort comments into a number of broad categories – even though many crossed such artificial boundaries. I suspect that skimming through the hundreds of comments will be as interesting to you as it was for me.
2. Astrobiology News for June 2018: Learning from Mars: Habitability Over Time
In this month’s Astrobiology News, Clergy Letter Project consultant and Adler Planetarium astronomer Grace Wolf-Chase discusses some of what we’ve learned from NASA’s Opportunity Mars Rover.
Some of you may have heard that NASA’s Opportunity Mars Rover is once again battling a dust storm. Although initially envisioned to be a 90-day mission to investigate signs of a watery past on Mars, Opportunity has already lasted 14 years, so by any measure, it’s been incredibly successful! Dust storms on Mars can attain very high wind speeds, but they don’t pack much of a wallop, since Mars’ atmosphere is so thin.(1) Nevertheless, the current storm is predicted to encircle the entire planet, and the dust has become quite thick over Endeavor Crater, where Opportunity resides. The rover has put itself into a low power mode, but should wake up again once it gets enough sunlight to charge its batteries.(2)
Whether or not Opportunity reassumes its normal operational mode, the Mars rovers have provided a wealth of evidence that water flowed on Mars’ surface during the distant past. A recent paper explores how Mars may have evolved from a wet world to an arid one, and discusses how Mars’ history might inform searches for habitable exoplanets.(3) Mounting evidence suggests that ancient Mars was not only wet, but may have had global oceans four billion years ago. So what happened to change this?
Although Mars has a very thin atmosphere today, it was once thick. The research team used sophisticated global 3D computer simulations to explore different types of atmospheric loss that would occur over time on a Mars-like world.(4) They found that the rate at which ions (charged particles) would have escaped from Mars’ atmosphere was more than a hundred times higher four billion years ago, due to the young Sun’s much more intense ultraviolet radiation and stronger solar wind, than today. This led to the loss of Mars’ thick atmosphere early in its history, which in turn led to the loss of surface water.
These results have implications for Mars-sized rocky worlds orbiting other stars; in particular, the large number of rocky exoplanets expected to reside in the habitable zones (HZs) of M-dwarf stars. M-dwarfs are cooler and smaller than our Sun, so the HZs of M-dwarfs lie much closer to these stars than HZs around stars like the Sun. Exoplanets in the HZs of M-dwarfs experience even more intense particle and radiation environments. Mars’ history may provide important guidance for choosing exoplanets to study in the future.
Until next month,
Grace Wolf-Chase, Ph.D. (gwolfchase@adlerplanetarium.org)
1. Although a terrific movie, the scene with the dust storm in The Martian took a bit of poetic license…
2. https://www.space.com/40881-monster-mars-dust-storm-opportunity-rover.html
3. Dong, C. et al., 2018, Modeling Martian Atmospheric Losses over Time: Implications for Exoplanetary Climate Evolution and Habitability, The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 859, L14.
4. See also https://aasnova.org/2018/05/30/marss-leaky-atmosphere-and-habitability/
3. How Scientific Questioning Impacts Faith
Our partner organization, Sinai and Synapses, has a regular blog that is well worth reading. One of their recent posts was entitled “How Scientific Questioning Impacts Faith.” The piece opens by asking the question, “Does science always have to be intellectual and faith spiritual, emotional, and intuitive?” The essay then goes on to note, “When navigating these divides in the practical world, through caring for others in pastoral, caregiver and chaplain roles, these binaries rapidly collapse, becoming no longer helpful. Answering difficult questions about the world and comforting people in a time of need requires the best wisdom from both religion and science.”
I suspect that you’ll want to read the rest of the article!
4. Creationism in Florida
Here’s the opening sentence from a disconcerting article that recently appeared in the Orlando Sentinel: “Some private schools in Florida that rely on public funding teach students that dinosaurs and humans lived together, that God’s intervention prevented Catholics from dominating North America and that slaves who “knew Christ” were better off than free men who did not.”
The article is entitled “Schools Without Rules: Private schools’ curriculum downplays slavery, says humans and dinosaurs lived together” and is well worth reading. Clearly, we have much work to do!
5. One Evangelical’s Journey Toward Scientific Understanding
Mike Beidler, a long-time Clergy Letter Project friend, has spoken publicly about his personal transformation or, as he put it, his “journey as an evangelical Christian who's come to terms with the scientific facts.” His talk was first delivered at the Smithsonian’s Hall of Human Origins at the invitation of the museum’s Broader Social Impacts Committee. More recently he delivered a shorter version at a church conference in Virginia. Mike describes the talk as having helped “church families address their own children's crises of faith.” You can listen to Mike by clicking here.
6. Evolution Weekend 2019
Because the number of clergy members who have signed one of our Clergy Letters has increased by almost 1,000 people over the past year or so, I would like to take a minute to summarize the basics of Evolution Weekend. Each year hundreds of congregations (or school or community groups) take a bit of time in February to do something they believe will raise the quality of the dialogue concerning the relationship between religion and science. Although each congregation acts independently, with some listening to a sermon and others hosting a guest speaker, some focusing attention on the topic during a religious school class and others discussing a relevant book or article over lunch, and some simply putting a note in their weekly bulletin, collectively, all across the globe, participants are making a coordinated and powerful statement about the compatibility of religion and science. There are two simple rules: 1) whatever you think is appropriate for your congregation IS appropriate for inclusion: and 2) you may participate any time in the temporal vicinity of our designated weekend. In other words, there’s no reason not to be listed as a participant just because one particular weekend doesn’t work for you and your congregation.
Evolution Weekend 2019 is scheduled for 8-10 February 2019. Please sign up now and help us reach even more than the approximately one million people we’ve reached directly since our first weekend in 2006. (When you consider the additional people we’ve reached via news reports of local events, our numbers increase dramatically!) Signing up is simple: just drop me a note! We already have congregations representing 29 states, the District of Columbia and three countries signed up to participate.
______ Of course I plan to participate in Evolution Weekend 2019! Please add me to the growing list of participants.
Name of Congregation:
Location:
Your Name:
You might be interested to note that an archive of past newsletters has been created. A permanent link to the archive can be found near the top left of our home page.
Finally, as always, I want to thank you for your continued support and as I do every month, I urge you to take one simple action. Please share this month’s Newsletter with a colleague or two (or post a link via any social media platform you use) and ask them to add their voices to those promoting a deep and meaningful understanding between religion and science. They can add their signatures to a Clergy Letter simply by dropping me a note at mz@theclergyletterproject.org. Together we are making a difference.
.
Michael
Michael Zimmerman
Founder and Executive Director
The Clergy Letter Project
www.theclergyletterproject.org
mz@theclergyletterproject.org