ReligionProf Podcast with Jessica Reed

ReligionProf Podcast with Jessica Reed June 12, 2019

This week’s ReligionProf Podcast features Jessica Reed, who is a colleague of mine at Butler University and a poet whose work explores the realm of science through poetry in ways that are fascinating and profoundly moving, illustrating the range of ways that we as human beings can engage with and explore knowledge of the natural world and ourselves and our place in it.

I highly recommend that you buy her book World, Composed. You won’t regret it! It is a dialogue, in poetic form, with Lucretius. You should also follow her on Twitter. See also the interview she did with the Bellingham Review. For samples of her work (both of which appear in the book) you can check out the following online: her poem “Wake: World, Arrived” published (with commentary) in North American Review, and “Atom, Cathedral” on the Indiana Humanities website.

It is hard to know what else to include in this blog post by way of additional links of related interest. You know that is my custom if you read my blog regularly. But as you are probably aware, but I had not reflected on fully until now, very few of the blogs and news sources that I subscribe to – and perhaps very few blogs and news sources period – are quite interdisciplinary enough to really fit here. Below I have some science and poetry related links that I think will be of related interest, but very little that genuinely spans the divide between science and art. Which just goes to show you how much need there is for exploration of those points of intersection and overlap!

Darwin’s Sacred Song

The Poetry and Music of Science

Thoughts on Awe at Pentecost: Science and faith have more in common than you think

The books of nature and scripture from a progressive Christian perspective

Richard Beck writes:

The knowledge we use to navigate and act in the world are mostly encoded in stories and images.

Day to day, the truth we require isn’t found with the scientists.

E = mc2 won’t tell you how to act in the world, but the Parable of the Good Samaritan will.

NOW HEAR THIS: WHEN POETS PRAY by Marilyn McEntyre


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