REFLECTIONS ON MY CHRISTIAN HERITAGE

This website contains drafts of chapters of a book tentatively entitled “Reflections of a Scientist on His Christian Heritage” being written by an 80 year-old physicist who is spending part of his time with his family, part of his time working on physics projects, part of his time serving as a deacon in the Catholic Church, and part of his time writing these chapters. The sidebar on the left gives the main categories in which these chapters have been classified. Clicking on a particular link brings up a list of the chapters in that category which are available for perusal by the viewer. Some of these web pages, namely the ones entitled Catholicism, Religions, Scripture, Theology and Tradition, are devoted to religious topics. For example, the Religions page provides discussions of Islam, the schismatic Society of Pius X, and the main Protestant denominations. The Cosmology page has chapters on scientific questions such as unacceptable  Intelligent Design, valid Providential Design, and the Big Bang Theory of Creation. Theoscience and Human Life treat topics that involve the interaction of science and theology. Finally the Autobiographical page contains personal background material that is pertinent to the book in preparation, and some of it is summarized in the next paragraph.

The webmaster is a cradle Catholic who was Jesuit educated at Brooklyn Preparatory (1941-45) and Fordham University (BA 1950, MS 1952). He spent seven months of his 18^th year speaking Latin as a novice at the Jesuit Novitiate St. Andrew-on-Hudson, a campus which is now the Culinary Institute of America. A dominant experience in his spiritual life was the 30 day long silent retreat called the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius which he experienced while there. In his secular career he spent a year doing radar research and development at Westinghouse, five years earning a doctorate in Physics at the University of Maryland, six years doing petrochemical/catalysis research at the Gulf Oil Company in a suburb of Pittsburgh, and 30 years on the Physics faculty at the University of South Carolina. His five children are grown up, and his 15 grandchildren were born between the years 1981 and 2000. He and his wife Kathleen celebrated their Golden Wedding Anniversary on October 17, 2003, thirteen months before she passed to her eternal reward on November 10, 2004. It would be appreciated it if you, the viewer, would pause for a moment and say a prayer for the repose of Kathleen’s soul.

RECENTLY POSTED MATERIAL

During March 2006 the webmaster gave some talks in his parish commenting on the controversial address that Pope Benedict XVI presented at Regensberg on September 12, 2006, and a summary of this material is posted in the Catholicism section. We posted in the Religions section, at the end of the essay on the Society of St. Pius X, the cover of an SSPX book published in 1989 which made the amazing and ironic prediction that their nemesis Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger would become Pope Benedict XVI sixteen years latter.