Michael Ruse and Teleology

My review of Michael Ruse's new book from Princeton University Press, at the Wall Street Journal.

The Quotable Darwin

Fans of Janet Browne's epic two-volume biography of Charles Darwin will not want to miss her new book, The Quotable Darwin (Princeton University Press), which features a broad selection of Darwin's personal and professional observations on life, liberty, and of course science.

Read more at Forbes...

A New Galileo Book...

...which I reviewed recently at Forbes. I met Fr. Scotti at Portsmouth Abbey School some years back, and am happy I was able to help him bring his book to the attention of the folks at Ignatius.

David Bentley Hart on the limits of natural law theory

"In abstraction from specific religious or metaphysical traditions, there really is very little that natural law theory can meaningfully say about the relative worthiness of the employments of the will. There are, of course, generally observable facts about the characteristics of our humanity (the desire for life and happiness, the capacity for allegiance and affinity, the spontaneity of affection for one’s family) and about the things that usually conduce to the fulfillment of innate human needs (health, a well-ordered family and polity, sufficient food, aesthetic bliss, a sense of spiritual mystery, leisure, and so forth); and if we all lived in a Platonic or Aristotelian or Christian intellectual world, in which everyone presumed some necessary moral analogy between the teleology of nature and the proper objects of the will, it would be fairly easy to connect these facts to moral prescriptions in ways that our society would find persuasive. We do not live in such a world, however." 

--From his 'Back Page' essay in the March 2013 issue of First Things.