God in Relational Trinity to Economic Office: Father, Son, Spirit

God in Relational Trinity to Economic Office:

Father, Son, Spirit

From time-to-time I like to take a time-out to publish another blogger's work. I learned of Steve Thomason's graphic story telling when taking a Homebrewed Class with him last year and have enjoyed his artwork exploring the Christian faith. Here, at Relevancy22, I am expanding Christianity as an extension and derivative of Whitehead's Process Philosophy which I describe as a form of Christian Process Theology centered in a Theology of Love as expressed in a Loving, and Lovingly abiding, God (as versus traditional Christian beliefs in a God who is wrathful, judgmental, and/or distanced from us because of divine holiness; these theologies teach divine love but place it last on their scales/definitions/orders of divine sovreignty).

In Steve's work, I sense that he, too, is attempting to revisualize traditional Christianity as a Theology of Love. Whether his sense of a process-based Christianity is present is a question for all of us as we learn to abandon Western Hellenized philosophy towards a more open, and relational, process-based theology of reflection, love, and presence.

To Steve and his flock,

Peace, Hope, and Blessings in Christ,

R.E. Slater

June 17, 2023

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A Cartoonist’s Guide to the Bible

Resources

The Trinity: Exploring the mystery of God

as three persons in one...

article link

~~  all brackets or organizational display are mine for the sake of greater clarity. - r.e. slater  ~~

There are two things that most Christians have in common:

• They believe in the Trinity–you know, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

• They don’t really understand it…at all.

The Christian scripture mentions three people [relational "economic" constructs - res] and gives them each divine qualities: the Father, the Son (Jesus), and the Holy Spirit. They all showed up at Jesus’ baptism at the same time, so they are distinct from each other. Yet, the Bible is pretty clear that there is only one God. Thus, the problem. Are there three gods, or one? Who are these three characters and how do they relate to each other and to the world?

These are questions which have always fascinated me. They captivate me so much so that I worked them into my Ph.D. dissertation. This page is the home base for all my studies and doodles revolving around the Trinity. I like to think about the Trinity in terms of [a] Social Trinity. Allow me to explain…

The following playlist of four short animations [5-7 minutes] will walk

you through the basic introduction to the Social Trinity:

The Social Trinity, Part 1: A Quick Overview

SteveThomason

The Social Trinity, Part 2: Theology Changes -- A Lesson from the Atom

SteveThomason

The Social Trinity, Part 3: The Modern I

SteveThomason

The Social Trinity, Part 4: The Fusion of Horizons

SteveThomason

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Steve Thomason: "This is an illustration I created to depict Augustine’s language around the interplay of the three persons of the Trinity. Notice how each section of the Celtic knot shows the evolution of the universe in the days of creation. Use the button below to buy it a poster print or print on canvas."  |  Buy Print

Flip through these [Powerpoint] slides to get a visual introduction to the Trinity [which I used in the videos above]. Use the button below to download the PowerPoint and Image Pack for your own study, preaching, and teaching.

Click here: The powerpoint enlarges and moves from document to document

The Trinity: A Cartoonist's Guide to the Triune God from Steve Thomason

Download PowerPoint and Image Pac

The Presentation below was created in Prezi. It is simply a visual repository of artifacts that I have created and collected along my journey of studying Trinity.

It is a dynamic, interactive document. You can either click the next button to be guided through the presenation, OR you can zoom in and out and drag your way around the document to explore it in your own way.

Many of the resources are clickable and the links will take you to my book reviews and further visualizations, or, in some cases where I have not written a review yet, to the book on Amazon.

Explore and Enjoy!

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THE TRINITY:

A More Academic Introduction…

~~  all brackets or organizational display are mine for the sake of greater clarity. - r.e. slater  ~~

My research project was called Deep in the Burbs. It is a story of the Triune God. The research question asks “How might an increased awareness of the social Trinity impact the ideation and praxis of spiritual formation in suburban ELCA congregations?”

It might be easy to think of this as if the social Trinity was a chunk of knowledge that could be presented to the Research Team for objective evaluation and ultimate acceptance or rejection.

This idea is (a) not congruent with my pedagogy (I will posit a communicative pedagogy in the Spiritual Formation Frame.) and, (b) contrary to the nature of the Triune God. The research was conducted in the understanding that God is not an object that can be studied or, a concept to be considered, but that God is the ground of being itself from which all life springs forth. (David Kelsey posits that all knowledge of God is secondary knowledge, and that, to understand God truly, the researcher must observe the activities of the local congregation in its specific context. Thus, the participatory action research methodology used in this research is, in itself, a theological inquiry into the mystery of the Triune God.)

All human speech about God is, at best, an analogy, metaphor, or simile. All theology is a human construction of symbols—models—that point to the unknowable God, but can never define or explain God. ((William C. Placher, The Triune God: An Essay in Postliberal Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 40-41.; see Peters on symbol. Ted Peters, God–the World’s Future : Systematic Theology for a New Era, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000).and Grenz on the use of model. Grenz and Olson, Who Needs Theology? : An Invitation to the Study of God.))

amazon link

Book Blurb: To many Christians theology is something alien, overly intellectual and wholly unappealing. Even seminary students are known to balk at the prospect of a course on theology. Yet theology--most simply, the knowledge of God--is essential to the life and health of the church. In this short introduction, Stanley Grenz and Roger Olson, two theologians who care deeply about the witness of ordinary Christians and the ministry of the church, show what theology is, what tools theology uses, why every believer (advanced degrees or not) is a theologian and how the theological enterprise can be productive and satisfying. Their clear, easily understood book is ideal for students, church study groups and individual Christians who want to strengthen understanding, belief and commitment by coming to know God more fully.

Therefore, this is a question that wonders:

(a) whether the models of the Triune God that we have inherited from our Western Theological predecessors are adequate and helpful for the current context in which the church finds itself, ((Here I am referring to the much rehearsed history of Athanasius’ victory over Arius at the Council of Nicea in which he demonstrated that God is three in person, but one in essence. His Immanent model of God as three-in-one within Godself has been reduced, over time, to monarchial modalism, at best, in Western, modern theology. The Immanent trinity, then, is the transcendent God of divine substance that is separated from the material world in the tradition of Platonic dualism.)) and,

(b) if an alternate model of the Trinity might provide more space for a missional imagination of spiritual formation in the local congregation.

Reframing the Model

What then, is the alternate model that I proposed to the research team? I named this model the social Trinity in the research question. It was my attempt to present a model that was true to the contemporary conversation about the Trinity. Western theologians have wrestled with the Trinity question throughout the twentieth century. Stanley Grenz offers a helpful schematic to help us map out the landscape of this conversation. He articulates three major types of Trinitarian thought in the twentieth century:

(1) those emphasizing the historicity and futurity of God—Moltmann, Pannenberg, Jenson;

(2) those emphasizing the relationality of God—Boff, LaCugna, Zizioulas; and,

(3) those emphasizing the transcendence, or otherness of God—Johnson, Urs von Balthasar, Torrance. ((Stanley J. Grenz, Rediscovering the Triune God: The Trinity in Contemporary Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004).))

Each of these theologians contribute important aspects to the conversation. The term social Trinity, however, is most readily associated with Moltmann and Volf.

I must confess that my language has changed since the initial crafting of this research question. I no longer find the term social to be the most helpful label for this model of the Trinity. This became apparent to me early on in the research project. The first indication came when I had the initial meetings with my pastoral contacts in the congregations. Whenever I got to the term social Trinity I could tell that there was pensive hesitation. They shuffled in theirs seats, and eventually asked the awkward question, “What do you mean by social Trinity?”

This was a helpful experience for two reasons. First, it affirmed my assumption that the terminology was not commonplace, even among clergy.

Second, upon further conversation, I realized that the term social was a trigger associated with one of two prejudices:

• One prejudice was the immediate association with the term social Gospel that harkens back to the liberal/fundamentalist schism of the early twentieth century.

• The other prejudice was the immediate association with the issue of social justice which signals work projects and activist movements.

I found myself immediately using the terms relational and relationships in order to explain the meaning of the social Trinity. One pastor suggested that I simply change the question to read “the relational Trinity.” This was a valid suggestion, but I opted to leave the language as it is because it is associated with a certain body of theological literature, whereas the term relational Trinity is not as widely used.

[Since then,] my language has expanded through the course of my research and I have found another term that is, perhaps equally foreign, but slightly more provocative and interesting. The term is entangled and is borrowed from Quantum Physics. ((see Simmons.; Polkinghorne.))

I would like to append the question to read, “How might an increased awareness of the social, relational, entangled Trinity impact the ideation and praxis of spiritual formation in suburban ELCA congregations?”

A Brief Summary of the

social/relational/entangled Trinity

The social/relational dimension [of Trinitarianism]

~~  all brackets or organizational display are mine for the sake of greater clarity. - r.e. slater  ~~

My use of social/relational draws most heavily on relational ontology as presented by Zizioulas (Zizioulas and McPartlan.) To summarize:

Zizioulas proposes that humanity, both as particulars and collectively, has the imago dei of the robust Trinity ((I have introduced the term robust into the conversation. This is Shults’ term to distinguish the relationality and futurity of God from the transcendent/Immanent Trinity.)) imprinted on/in us ontologically.

The image of the relational Trinity is this:

• God is three-in-one and one-in-three.

• God is transcendent, immanent, and relationality [itself].

• God’s transcendence is the immanent Trinity that is constituted by relationality.

• This relational union is wholly Other [as distinguished] from its [ontologically relational] creation.

• God is also immanent in the economic Trinity.

• The Father is arche [(sic, as in Jungian motif) - re slater],

• The Son incarnate is the demonstration of God’s love and the great victor over death.

I will agree with Volf and not go so far as Zizioulas to warrant patriarchal authority in the church based upon the arche [which is a cultural, rather than theological, accomodation - re slater].

Volf, bringing Moltmann into conversation with Zizioulas, calls for an egalitarian power structure based upon a flattened perichoretic power structure. Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity.) [perichoretic - a doctrine of the reciprocal inherence of the human and divine natures in Christ.- re slater]

• The Spirit is the animator and mediator of life and relationality.

• God is also relationality that constitutes all being and out of which human particularity is formed.

• Humanity [AND creation - re slater] is created in the imago dei.

• We are homologues of the robust Trinity described above. [homologue - something that has a similar position, structure, value, or purpose to something else... - re slater]

((I am intentionally hinting at the Augustinian use of “vestiges of God.” A fascinating sub-conversation within the larger Trinitarian conversation is that of Augustine’s culpability for the demise of the Economic Trinity in the modern West.

[e.g., The Economic Trinity refers to the idea of separate office, or function, within the relational Trinity. The basic idea is that the economic Trinity is the epistemological ground of the immanent Trinity whereas the immanent Trinity is the ontological ground of the economic Trinity. More simply, we think the bible teaches a functioning God of relational personages and office like one would deem a community of individuals in social arrangement with one another serving in differing capacities to their community at large. - re slater]

LaCugna, et alia [male, plural neuter tense as opposed to et aliae, the feminine plural neuter tense. - re slater], blames him for the problem. Barnes disagrees and notes that LaCugna’s argument is built upon a resurgence of de Regnon’s claim in the 19th century, which, Barnes argues, is unfounded.

I agree with Barnes and follow Sheldrake’s assessment that Augustine understood relational ontology inherently, since he did not breath the air of Cartesian dualism. Michael R. Barnes, “Augustine in Contemporary Trinitarian Theology,” Theological Studies 56, no. 2 (1995). Philip Sheldrake, Spirituality and Theology: Christian Living and the Doctrine of God (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998), 75-83.))

Statedly, "We are many-and-one and one-and-many. We are individual selves constituted by the relatedness to each other, to nature, and to God, the transcendent other." - Steve Thomason

Relational ontology connects to the theoretical lens of Robert Kegan’s fifth order of consciousness, as mentioned in the Spiritual Formation Frame.

Here it is enough to mention how the social/relational Trinity is connected, not only to theological language, but to ideas about, and formation of, the human self-in-relation to the other. ((both Groome and Farley emphasize this as essential to the practice of formation in the congregation and in any theological inquiry.

• Groome names the individual as “Agent-Subjects-in-Relationship.” Farley names it as “being-together” in the reciprocity sphere.

• Groome, Sharing Faith: A Comprehensive Approach to Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry: The Way of Shared Praxis.

• Edward Farley, Practicing Gospel: Unconventional Thoughts on the Church’s Ministry, 1st ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003).))

Zizioulas proposes that it is not only our eschatological hope that is connected to the social Trinity...

• ((Eschatological hope is central to the “historicity/futurity” grouping that Grenz noted: Moltmann, Pannenberg, and Jenson. Zizioulas does not deny this dimension, but simply emphasizes the ontological aspect of this Trinitarian conversation. Here, too, I argue that we must abandon substance dualism in light of relationality and entanglement.))

...but it is our very essence, our ontological essence, that is constituted by the relationality of the persons of the Godhead.

The use of communicative action as the research methodology in this project assumes that the congregations might discover the reality of their interdependence with the other, both within the congregation and within the suburban and metropolitan community as a whole.

Entangled Trinitarian Panentheism

I have added the term entangled to my Trinitarian model based upon a growing body of research that explores the interface of Theology with Quantum Physics. ((Polkinghorne.)) Simmons provides a helpful metaphor with his proposal of Entangled Trinitarian Panentheism.

[pan-en-theism, is the preferred term to that of either classical theism which speaks to God's transcendence over that of divine immanence; while the Buddhistic paradigm of pantheism speaks to divine immanence and identity with creation without any form of transcendence.

Panentheism admits transcendence but states it is of no meaning to a created world without divine presence. That God's immanent sustainability and abiding indwelling is the more meaningfully relevant term for divine creation than are terms such as "transcendence".

Truly God is Other than creation. But God likewise indwells, abides, sustains, in present, etc., as the bible teaches. It is also the preferred terms used by process theology's when speaking to a creation in panentheistic terms which then deeply admits to all processual forms found in process theology of which "open and relational (process) theology" attempts to elicit (ORT v ORPT).

ORT by itself is more of a progressive term for evangelical theology. ORPT is the more proper foundation for ORT out of which ORT has been birthed.

- re slater]

...[Polkinghorne] borrows the term entanglement from Quantum Physics and attaches it to the ancient Greek term perichoresis. ((This term was used by the Greek Fathers to describe the relationships between the three persons of the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It means to move in and out of each other, or to dance around. [Entanglement] brings [to mind] the images of a mutual, equal interpenetration and indwelling of all three persons [into creation]. It, however, existed within Godself, thus was not helpful for how God related to the world.))

[Polkinghorne] finds this helpful for discussing the apparent dualisms in the theological debates about the Trinity, namely (1) is God one or three persons, and (2) is God the Immanent Trinity or the Economic Trinity? ((the debate made famous by Karl Barth and Karl Rahner.))

Simmons proposes that “perichoresis entanglement can be understood as the energy of the divine Trinity through which the creation is expressed. The immanent Trinity exists in superposition with the economic Trinity and evolves within the entangled life of God with the creation, thus supporting a panentheistic model of God.”  ((Simmons, 144.))

Simmons claims that his proposal of Entangled Trinitarian Panentheism may: 

• Through phase entanglement and non-local relational holism provide metaphors for the perichoretic activity of the Trinity immanently and economically in sustaining and sanctifying the creation from within a scientifically consistent panentheism;

• Through quantum indeterminacy, affirm the freedom and openness of the creation in relation to divine self-limitation and the problem of suffering;

• Provide a conceptual bridge between creation and the Trinitarian character of the divine life;

• Contribute to the mutual understanding and interaction of theology and science;

• Assist interested persons in deepening their understanding and appreciation for the divine mystery of the Trinity; and

• Help provide a basis for interfaith dialog and cooperation as we collectively address the global issues of our time.”⁠ ((Ibid., 187-188.))

- [ EXCELLENT ! - re slater]

The Trinity and the Research Team

It is the assumption of this research that the suburban, ELCA congregation is the product of the dominant Western, immanent Trinitarian view mentioned above, and that its ideation and praxis of spiritual formation has been heavily influenced by it. The introduction of the social/relational/entangled Trinity, to the congregations through participatory action research methodologies will both expose the congregations to a, presumably, new way of thinking about God, and will allow them to experience the relationality of God through the communicative action inherent in the process itself.

Trinity Bibliography

• Book | Christ and the Cosmos: A Reformulation of Trinitarian Doctrine by Keith Ward
• The concept of the ‘social Trinity’, which posits three conscious subjects in God, radically revised the traditional Christian idea of the Creator. It promoted a view of God as a passionate, creative, and responsive source of all being. Keith Ward argues that social Trinitarian thinking threatens the unity of God, however, and that this new view of God does not require a ‘social’ component. Expanding on the work of theologians such as Barth and Rahner, who insisted that there was only one mind of God, Ward offers a coherent, wholly monotheistic interpretation of the Trinity. Christ and the Cosmos analyses theistic belief in a scientific context, demonstrating the necessity of cosmology to theological thinking that is often overly myopic and anthropomorphic. This important volume will benefit those who seek to understand what the Trinity is, why it matters, and how it fits into a scientific account of the universe.

• Book | The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three: Discovering the Radical Truth and the Heart of Christianity by Cynthia Bourgeault
• Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In this formula that Christians recite as though on autopilot lie the secrets for healing our world, rekindling our visionary imagination, and manifesting the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. It’s an astonishing claim, but one that is supported by Cynthia Bourgeault’s exploration of Trinitarian theology—and by her bold work in further articulating the deep truth it contains. She looks to the ancient concept in light of the ideas of G. I. Gurdjieff and Jacob Boehme to reveal the Trinity as the “hidden driveshaft” within Christianity: the compassionate expression of the Uncreated Reality in creation.

• Book | The Social God and the Relational Self by Stanley Grenz
• Grenz, Stanley J. The Social God and the Relational Self: A Trinitarian Theology of the Imago Dei. 1st ed. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001. Author – Stanley Grenz Grenz traces the historical backdrop of the concept of self in the West in order to warrant his proposal of the ecclesial self as the best response to the postmodern deconstruction of self. The following sketch attempts to follow his logic. In the final analysis, then, the imago dei ...

• Book | The Practice of Communicative Theology by Scharer and Hilberath
• Scharer, Matthias Hilberath Bernd Jochen. The Practice Of Communicative Theology: Introduction To A New Theological Culture. New York: Crossroad Pub. CO. 2008. The Authors — Matthias Scharer and Bernd Jochen Hilberath My Reflections Sharer and Hilberath are two German, Roman Catholic theologians who have adopted Ruth Cohn’s Theme-Centered Interaction (TCI) model as the means of doing theology. This pedagogy comes from a long history of Catholic theology and is rooted, most apparently, in Habermas’ communicative rationality. The combination ...

• Book | The Entangled Trinity by Ernest Simmons
• Book | The Entangled Trinity by Ernest Simmons

• Article | A Trinitarian Perspective on Christian Spirituality by Mark McIntosh
• Mark McIntosh’s work is important to my research. He has done an incredible job of connecting Trinitarian theology to spirituality. This is obviously important to my research question in which I ask how an increased awareness of social Trinity might impact spiritual formation. Holder, Arthur, ed. The Blackwell Companion to Christian Spirituality Blackwell Companions to Religion. Oxford; Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2005. Chapter 10 Trinitarian Perspectives on Christian Spirituality by Mark A. McIntosh “In a real sense, the whole ...

• Book | The Trinity and an Entangled World edited by John Polkinghorne
• Polkinghorne, J. C. The Trinity and an Entangled World: Relationality in Physical Science and Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. 2010. Editor – John Polkinghorne This book is a collection of essays that deals directly with one of the core theological frames of my research: relational ontology. One of the essays is an article by Wildman that I have reviewed here. Simply put, relationality is the essence of God, and thus, the essence of ...

• Article | Augustine in Contemporary Trinitarian Theology by Michel Barnes
• My research relies heavily on the Social Trinity and draws upon theologians like Lacugna, Moltmann, Zizioulas, among others. It is important to note that not everyone agrees with their theological constructs. Michel Barnes is a key voice that has pointed out a fundamental flaw in the recent Trinitarian conversation. The flaw centers on a misunderstanding and misappropriation of Augustines’s doctrine of the Trinity. Barnes statement can be summarized: I have argued that contemporary systematic appropriations of ...

• Book | God the Spirit by Michael Welker
• Welker, Michael. God the Spirit. 1st English-language ed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994. The Author – Michael Welker Welker is the Director of the Research Center for International and Interdisciplinary Theology at the University of Heidelberg. This book has had a significant impact on my research. The key ideas that I glean from Welker are that the Spirit is pluriform and polycentric. In other words, the Spirit takes on many different forms (pluriform) throughout the world, depending upon the ...

• Book | The Quest for the Trinity by Stephen R. Holmes
• 
• Holmes, Stephen R. The Quest for the Trinity. Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2012. The Author – Stephen R. Holmes My Thoughts This book is a helpful and refreshing counterbalance to my growing bibliography concerning the 20th century Trinitarian conversation in the West. Stephen Holmes is a brilliant scholar from the UK who speaks to this topic from the English Evangelical perspective. The book itself is essentially an historical survey of the Doctrine of the Trinity in Western theology. What ...

• Edmund Hill’s Translation of Augustine’s De Trinitate
• I am very pleased to have found Edmund Hill’s Translation of Augustine’s De Trinitate. Previously I had been reading Phillip Schaff’s late 19th century translation and found it difficult to digest. Hill brings a brightness to the text that I find much more comprehensible, and actually enjoyable to read. Special thanks to Fred Sanders for the nudge. It is my goal to make a thorough reading of this text before the New Year dawns.

• Book | Beyond Foundationalism by Stanley Grenz and John Franke
• Book | Beyond Foundationalism by Stanley Grenz and John Franke

• Book | After Our Likeness by Miroslav Volf
• Volf, Miroslav. After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity Sacra Doctrina. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1998. The Author Professor Volf is the founding Director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. His books include Allah: A Christian Response (2011); Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace (2006), which was the Archbishop of Canterbury Lenten book for 2006; Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, ...

• Book | Systematic Theology by Robert Jenson
• Jenson, Robert W. Systematic Theology. Vol. 1. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. The Author After two decades of teaching at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg, Jenson moved in 1988 to the religion department of St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. He was joined in Northfield by his friend Carl Braaten, and together they founded the conservative Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology in 1991. The founding of this Center marked a new period of ...

• Book | Rediscovering the Triune God by Stanley Grenz
• Grenz, Stanley J. Rediscovering the Triune God: The Trinity in Contemporary Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004. The Author While in the pastorate (1979-1981), Grenz taught courses both at the University of Winnipeg and at Winnipeg Theological Seminary (now Providence Seminary). He served as Professor of Systematic Theology and Christian Ethics at the North American Baptist Seminary, Sioux Falls, South Dakota from 1981-1990. For twelve years (1990-2002), Grenz held the position of Pioneer McDonald Professor of Baptist Heritage, ...

• Article | No Trinity, No Mission by Gary Simpson
• Simpson, Gary. “No Trinity, No Mission: The Apostolic Difference of Revisioning the Trinity.” Word and World, vol. XVIII, number 3, Summer 1998. No Trinity No Mission – Simpson – flattened – my annotated copy of the article. The Author Gary Simpson is a professor of Systematic Theology at Luther Seminary on St. Paul, MN. He is also an ordained pastor in the ELCA. My Thoughts This article traces the history of Trinitarian thought in the west and demonstrates how, without the ...

• Book | A Theology of the Built Environment
• 
• Timothy Gorringe explores justice, empowerment, and redemption in how humanity encounters and builds within spaces and places in creation.

• Book | Christopraxis by Edmund Arens
• Arens, Edmund. Christopraxis: A Theology of Action. 1st Fortress Press ed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995. The Author Edmund Arens is a catholic theologian and professor of Fundamental Theology at the University of Luzern, Switzerland. Fundamental Theology is “a relatively recent theological discipline whose object and method has not altogether been clarified by theologians themselves. It is clear, however, that a task of fundamental theology is to verify the foundations of theology. Thus, before deepening in the knowledge ...

• Book | God For Us by Catherine LaCugna
• LaCugna, Catherine Mowry. God for Us : The Trinity and Christian Life. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991. A Substantial Inquiry into Catherine LaCugna’s God With Us, focusing on Part I | by Steve Thomason | A Term Paper Presented to Professor Gary Simpson | Luther Seminary | As a Requirement in Course CL8950 Trinity and Mission | St. Paul, Minnesota | 2012 Introduction The purpose of this paper is to engage in dialogue with the first part of Catherine LaCugna’s book God for Us: Trinity and Christian Life. The scope and ...

• Book | Communion and Otherness by John D. Zizioulas
• Zizioulas, Jean, and Paul McPartlan. Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church. New York: T & T Clark, 2006. Author John Zizioulas (Greek: Ιωάννης Ζηζιούλας; born 10 January 1931, Kozani) is the Eastern Orthodox metropolitan of Pergamon. He is the Chairman of the Academy of Athens and a noted theologian. My Thoughts on Communion and Otherness I will be brief and to the point in this reflection. There is one thing that I glean from this ...

• Book | Systematic Theology by Pannenberg
• Pannenberg, Wolfhart. Systematic Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991. Author Wolfhart Pannenberg (born on October 2, 1928) is a German theologian. He has made a number of significant contributions to modern theology, perhaps most notably his concept of history as a form of revelation centered on the Resurrection of Christ, which has been widely debated in both Protestant and Catholic theology, as well as by non-Christian thinkers. My Thoughts on Pannenberg On Pannenberg’s Methodology In his Introduction to Systematic Theology, ...

• Book | The Trinity and the Kingdom by Jürgen Moltmann
• Moltmann, Jürgen. The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God. 1st HarperCollins paperback ed. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991. Author Jürgen Moltmann (born 8 April 1926) is a German Reformed theologian who is Professor Emeritus of Systematic Theology at the University of Tübingen. Moltmann is a major figure in modern theology and was the recipient of the 2000 Grawemeyer Award in Religion, and was also selected to deliver the prestigious Gifford Lectures in 1984-1985. He has ...

• Article | The Incarnation and the Trinity by Christopher B. Kaiser
• Kaiser, Christopher B. “The Incarnation and the Trinity: Two Doctrines Rooted in the Offices of Christ.” Greek Orthodox Theological Review 43, no. 1-4 (1998): 221-255. Author Chris Kaiser began his professional life as a scientist and went on to become a theologian, and his teaching vocation has always included working to build bridges between his two disciplines. He has been part of Western’s faculty since 1976. He has also served as lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and at ...

• Article | A Trinitarian Grammar of the Liturgy by E. Byron Anderson
• E. Byron Anderson says: In their attempts to work out a practical theology of the Trinity, LaCugna, Moltmann, and Boff share three points. They argue, first, that language about the Trinity is inherently and primarily doxological. Second, a reading of the ...

• Paper | An Introduction to Relational Ontology by Wesley J. Wildman
• Abstract This paper argues that there is value in a systematic philosophical approach to relations and surveys some of the major issues in the philosophy of relations. Rather than siding withrelational ontology over substantivist ontology, however, the paper argues that the best philosophical approaches are causal theories of relation in which both relations and entities take their rise from an ontologically fundamental causal flux. The causal theories of relation and entities discussed here are Neoplatonist participation ...

• Book | Spirituality and Theology: Christian Living and the Doctrine of God by Philip Sheldrake
• Spirituality and Theology by Philip Sheldrake This book is a gold mine for my research. Sheldrake connects the contemporary study of Christian Spirituality directly to the Social Trinity. He also provides an excellent historical summary of why spirituality and theology have been estranged since the dawn of the modern era. My Annotated Scan of the section The Significance of Trinitarian Theology. (75-83) He defends Augustine against accusations of individualism. The fundamental truth of our existence is that human beings ...

• Article | Appropriating the Divine Presence: Reading Augustine’s On the Trinity as a Transformative Text by Edward Howells
• Appropriating the Divine Presence Reading Augustine as Transformative my annotated copy This article contributes to my case that I must delve deeply into Augustine’s On The Trinity. The paper I wrote back in the spring is proving to be a bit prophetic for the course of study. Here Howells helps me understand Augustine’s pre-modern understanding of the relationality of the trinitarian persons and the better understanding of interiority. Dr. Edward Howells is a lecturer in Christian Spirituality at ...

• Article | Spirituality and Social Change: Rebuilding the Human City by Philip Sheldrake
• Sheldrake, Philip. “Spirituality and Social Change: Rebuilding the Human City.” Spiritus 9, no. 2 (2009): 137-156. “To be human embodies a common life and a common task…it is important to note the intimate link between human identity and a Trinitarian theology of God.” (138) This article is important for my work. It addresses some of my main points: Trinity, Augustine, space and place, urban/suburban planning, interiority and exteriority in spirituality.
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God & Nature - Creation Care

Creation Care: What is it?

an interview with Dorothy Boorse

http://godandnature.asa3.org/interview-dorothy-boorse.html

by Emily Ruppel and Dorothy Boorse

In your own words, what is “creation care” and why is it important to Christians, specifically?

Care of the natural world is a part of the job of all people. I think that’s the central concept of creation care.

How did you become involved in this movement and why? Who else do you see as a leader in this area, and who can become involved?

I grew up on a small farm with parents who were committed to caring for the world.  I attended Mennonite schools. Mennonites are committed to peace and justice and have a strong ethic of simple living. These things and an abiding love of the natural world born from camping trips, gardening and time with my family outdoors, gave me a drive to protect the natural world. My college mentors especially Richard Wright and Tom Dent and my experience at AuSable Institute cemented this desire.

(This is too many questions in one question!)

Anyone can get involved!

Many denominations have some type of creation care program.

Many relief and development agencies do as well.

I especially appreciate the work of organizations like Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, AuSable Institute, Renewal, and Restoring Eden because of their emphasis on working with young people.

How have atheist or secular environmental science groups responded to this call to action? 

I can speak to atheists, but in my experience, secular groups have been glad to have a Christian voice calling for caring for the environment. In the last decade in particular, many scientific and environmental groups have reached out to faith communities.

What do you think is the most important habit or lifestyle choice to cultivate for Christians who want to make a daily impact on helping the environment? What else can we do?

I don’t know what the single most effective thing is, but I think we need a mindfulness continually. It’s very similar to diet and exercise.

If you live unhealthily, you have to change your lifestyle, it isn’t just one little thing.  I think we need to be “earth healthier “ I also think we will need significant new ideas. For example, having Zip cars for car sharing is a radical way to avoid having everyone own their own car. I think we need more such ideas.

What else should God & Nature readers know about Christian environmentalism in the 21st century?

I think there is support for care of the environment that comes out of a concern for the next generation. Knowing that we are making decisions today that affect the welfare not only of the poorest among us now, but of future generations, is a motivator to be more intentional in our actions.  I would want readers to connect North American evangelical Christianity to Christianity all around the world. Roman Catholics, Orthodox, Anabaptists, and a range of protestant groups all care about the environment.

Related Article -

Religious, Interfaith Environmental Organizations Put The Faith Back In Green Activism

G&N - Poetry for Scientists?

Poetry for Scientists?

http://godandnature.asa3.org/featured-essay-poetry-for-scientists.html

by Walt Hearn

At one time in my academic career, courses with names like "Chemistry for Poets" were being introduced. The idea was to teach liberal arts students at least something about chemistry without turning them off. My colleagues on the chemistry faculty used to debate whether mathematically minimal, non-laboratory courses in science would do more harm than good.

I forget which side of that debate I was on. Obviously it was better to produce liberal arts alumni who appreciated science rather than ignoring it or hating it. But would "science-lite" give them false impressions about science―and about their knowledge of it? Lately I've been thinking about the reverse situation. Would courses like "Poetry for Chemists" do much to humanize the scientific profession?

Readers of God & Nature may want to weigh in on this question. Anyone trained in science who is also a committed Christian knows that using scientific language is not the only way to say something important. God speaks to us from the Bible in an intensely personal way, sometimes in a special kind of structured language chosen for its emotive power. That's what poetry is. Actually, by even the strictest definition, poetry makes up over a third of the Old Testament, with other poetic passages scattered throughout the whole Bible. If the living God feels free to speak in poetic form, why shouldn't we? Chemists know how to speak in formulas, equations, objective analysis―why not in poetry?

To be literate, in the broadest sense, is to be educated. Literally, the word "literate" refers to an ability to read and write. When scientists complain that most of the general population is "scientifically illiterate," we mean that they couldn't read a scientific report and discuss it. Over fifty years ago, that situation was brought to public attention in a lecture by C. P. Snow, published as The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1959). In this famous paragraph he chided the British elite for not caring enough about science:

"As with the tone-deaf, they don't know what they miss. They give a pitying chuckle at the news of scientists who have never read a major work of English literature. They dismiss them as ignorant specialists. Yet their own ignorance and their own specialisation is just as startling. A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: 'Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?' " (pp. 15-16).

Snow was not your run-of-the-lab scientist, although he earned a Ph.D. in physics from Cambridge in 1930 and spent ten years in research on molecular structure before becoming a civil servant. During WWII he was in charge of recruiting scientists for the British war effort. But he also wrote a series of successful novels about academic life in England, bridging the scientific and literary cultures himself.

Two years before C. P. Snow delivered that Rede Lecture, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first man-made earth satellite. That feat forced the West to play technological catch-up in a cold-war space race, initiating a kind of "golden age" for scientists in the U.S. But as research surged ahead, the American public's knowledge of science lagged far behind. Citizens in a democracy must vote on policies requiring some technical understanding, including policies affecting the funding of research. Aware of its precarious situation, the scientific establishment has been trying to educate the general public ever since: "Give everybody some experience with real science and many of them will begin to think the way scientists think." The problem with that idea is that real laboratory courses are expensive to teach, and what many students in the humanities remember about, say, a chemistry lab is that "it was awfully smelly." Hence, proposals for dumbed-down, non-laboratory courses like "Chemistry for Poets."

Scientists might make a better case for science literacy if we weren't such "literary illiterates." We're all familiar with what is called the scientific literature, but it has about the same relation to literature as rap has to music: at best a highly specialized fragment of the whole, at worst a different thing altogether. A few scientists have written well enough about science to make a name for themselves (and for science) among the general public. My A-list would include biologist Rachel Carson (geographer), Jared Diamond (anthropologist), Loren Eiseley (paleontologist), Stephen Jay Gould (molecular biologist), James Watson, and a number of others. A few scientists have written widely about other things or even written fiction, like biochemist Isaac Asimov and chemist Carl Djerassi. And, of course, biologist Charles Darwin wrote "a classic."

One literary genre, science fiction ("sci-fi"), seems to have stimulated a good many scientific careers. Great, but it should be possible for scientists to broaden our horizons beyond reading technical papers and weird tales of space travel. Would literature courses for scientists be an effective way of doing that? I'm still not sure. Just as looking at science from the outside doesn't present a true picture, I doubt that dabbling in literature from an external, analytical, spectator stance would get us very far. What we would need is the equivalent of a "literary laboratory"--that is, some hands-on experience to help us think like the writers of real literature.

Poetry would certainly be a good place to begin, even though many people feel that poetry is written to be deliberately obscure. I've heard that when the Cambridge mathematical physicist Paul Dirac learned that J. Robert Oppenheimer of the Manhattan Project wrote poetry, Dirac said, "The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible." A gross exaggeration, from my point of view, even if Dirac was a genius.

A special section of Science for 13 August 2010 argued that teaching science and literature in the same classrooms, wherever possible, would benefit both kinds of education. Contributing to that issue was an environmental toxicologist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Arthur Stewart. He emphasized that ambiguous words, phrases, and figures of speech enrich our communication in science as well as in poetry. Stewart has had four books of his own poems published, the first in 2003. He published his fourth collection, The Ghost in the Word, in 2013. Could more of us do that? Maybe my personal experience as a working scientist and amateur poet could encourage others to experiment with literature―by taking a stab at, say, writing poetry. Of course, producing a few good poems won't mean that we should quit our day jobs.

Scientists have a problem here. We spend much of our lives in a largely "objective" mode, keeping ourselves aloof from feelings and out of the data as much as possible. We don't want to be stirred. We don't trust our emotions. Carry that too far and we turn ourselves into soulless machines. 

Starting from Scratch

As a freshman chemistry major I took chemistry, physics, biology, calculus, German, and English. That meant five afternoon labs a week (two in chemistry, two in biology, one in physics), leaving little time to read Shakespeare even if I had had the inclination. With other classmates in science and engineering, I took the standard freshman English course along with a lot of bright English majors. That was my only English course in four years of college. What I remember is that it made me feel ignorant and stupid. That was partly because the professor continuously expressed disdain for technical professions, but mostly because I really was ignorant. I can't blame my high school teachers for that. My mind had been on other things. I couldn't see the point of literature that seemed so unrelated to my interests.

Indeed, the literature we dissected in that freshman English class was of less interest to me than the frog I was dissecting in biology lab. The prof seemed to take delight in badgering science majors, calling on us by name to confirm his poor opinion of us. Once, after assigning John Keats's poem "Ode to a Nightingale," he focused on the line, "Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards." One after another he forced the science majors to confess that they didn't know what "pards" meant. When he got to me, I recall saying (in the Texas drawl I still had), "Aw, that's easy. It means his companions—you know, his pardners." Bad guess (it's "leopards"). Only once did I score a point. In class one day I argued that science is more valuable than literature because science is based on fact. "Aha!" (the leopard pounced): "Surely you know, Mr. Hearn, that there is a difference between fact and truth." Somehow I found nerve enough to reply, "Well, I may be confused, sir. For instance, was what you just said the truth, or was it a fact?" For once it was the professor who felt rescued when the bell rang.

Actually I had an earlier exposure to poetry in a form I didn't even recognize as poetry. It was a tradition in my Boy Scout troop for young assistant scoutmasters to recite long narrative poems around our campfires, strong stuff like Percy French's Abdul Abulbul Amir, Rudyard Kipling's Gunga Din, and especially the adventurous tales of Robert W. Service, like The Shooting of Dan McGrew and The Cremation of Sam McGee. As a kid I loved the sound of those rhythmic yarns spun out in the semi-darkness on camping trips. My favorite was a long narrative about trudging through Yukon ice and snow, The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill. After all these years, I can still recite the way it begins:

I took a contract to bury the body of "Blasphemous Bill" McKye,

Wherever, whenever, or whatsoever the manner of death he die . . . 

There's a huge difference between hearing a poem recited and seeing the words printed on a page. In grad school I did some focused listening. From the university library I checked out recordings of Gilbert & Sullivan operettas and played them over and over again, memorizing the lyrics of a number of the funny "patter" songs. I can still come up with memorable lines from The Sorcerer:

Oh! my name is John Wellington Wells,

I'm a dealer in magic and spells,

In blessings and curses

And ever-filled purses,

In prophecies, witches, and knells . . .

Enjoying such clever word-play, it finally dawned on me that all those hymns I had sung (off-key) growing up in church, were actually poems―or at least verses. I tried writing a few verses myself, including a ballad to a folk tune then being sung by The Weavers, On Top of Old Smoky. My version began, "On top of old East Chem, there's a light burning bright: / The graduate students are working tonight."

The ballad told of my major professor dropping in for what was known in our lab as a "midnight research conference." On this occasion he offered suggestions for characterizing what seemed to be a new amino acid that I had just obtained by hydrolyzing the antibiotic streptothricin:

"Well, first I would benzoylate, then if I were you,

Get a neutral equivalent is the next thing to do."

And as he was leaving, he turned to retort,

"Have it all done by morning for the Progress Report."

In 1955 I began teaching at Iowa State College. I was assigned a biochemistry course that was a prerequisite for a nutrition course taken by all students in home economics. Most of them couldn't see the point of learning "all that chemical stuff," so I kept trying new ways to catch their interest. One year I wrote a parody of songs from Annie Get Your Gun and handed out copies of the libretto. The plot featured a coed named Fannie who had no fun, not seeing the point of it all ("You Can't Get a Man with Your Brain") until she got a crush on her lab instructor. He tried to inspire her, singing:

The girl that I marry will have to be

Loaded with glucose and ATP;

The girl I call my own

Will have adrenocorticotrophic hormone . . .

Everything ended happily, including that term's class. Another term I went high-class, with a "Metabolic Opera" condensation, Carbon, based on music by Georges Bizet. In a big reduction scene, the sexy heroine tossed valence electrons to Don CoA (coenzyme A), with glycolysis and the Krebs cycle playing out to various arias like Seguidilla, all sung by Eugene "Gino" Lazzari, a grad student of mine with an operatic range. He was at his thundering best as "Oxy-geno" in the "Toreador's Song," explaining that "Oxygen is the stuff that makes life go, / For every H, you know, / Must go to H2O." He sang that the chain of hydrogen-transfer reactions "Builds ATP, / Aerobically." And toward the end:

What comes next?

You should have read the text,

For men have written tomes

About the cytochromes . . .

My opera had a short run (the day before the final in my 8:00 AM class) but was a critical success. Thunderous applause brought people from all over the Chemistry building to see what was up.

From Parody to Poetry

In 1960, Iowa State became a university, with a new Department of Biochemistry & Biophysics. I was one of the founding members, transferring from Chemistry. For our first departmental party I wrote another libretto, The Launching of the B&B, to music from HMS Pinafore. Faculty colleagues in the chorus complained that only a tone-deaf person would have chosen the most difficult music from Gilbert & Sullivan's original.

I left ISU in 1972, moving that year to Berkeley. In 1985 I was invited back to Ames for the B&B Department's 25th anniversary, to give a talk on its beginnings. I was pleased that a repeat performance of my old Launching of the B&B was part of the celebration. In 2010 I was again invited back, this time to help celebrate the 50th anniversary of what has now become the Dept. of Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Molecular Biology. A "near-death experience" (from ventricular fibrillation) forced me to cancel the trip but I sent a copy of my remarks to be read by someone else on the occasion. I included a celebratory sonnet, which gave some indication that I had composed it while still in the hospital:

A TOAST TO THE DEPARTMENT, AT FIFTY

A wonder, is what it is, that ISU

Should boast this scholarly community

Called "BBMB," where more than just a few

Molecular explorers (of various degree)

Employ vibrational waves of varying length

To penetrate parameters unknown:

Perhaps an enzyme-substrate bonding strength

Or nucleotide components of a clone

(World-class research, I'd say, "state of the art"),

Probing more deeply than a surgeon's knife

The inner core (in metaphor, the "heart") 

Of robust fragility, which we call "life."

So here's a toast: May your "vibes" increase;

May every member's wonder never cease.

My efforts to write serious poems, sometimes with a touch of whimsy, go back to 1963. The turning point for me was hearing a real poet, Prof. Richard Gustafson of the English Department, read some of his works in progress at a monthly "coffee house" that had just been organized by students. I was the only other faculty member there, so carried away by the experience that I rashly volunteered to read my own poems the following month. Then I had to write feverishly to add to my only two attempts up to that time! "Gus" attended my reading and was surely less impressed by my poems than by the fact that a practicing biochemist had made the effort. Anyway, he invited me to submit something for Poet & Critic, a moribund little magazine he was nurturing back to life. I submitted a sonnet with an explicitly biblical theme. When it took the prize ($30) for the best poem in that issue, I was hooked.

If I had known anything about poetry, I might have realized that sonnets were out of style. I tried writing free verse, with rhythm but no rhyme or set pattern, but found that it kept getting out of control and going on and on. In contrast, sonnets were both patterned and short; when I finished line 14, I knew I was done. Somehow that format must have been lurking in my brain since high-school English.

When Ginny and I moved to Berkeley in 1972, she soon became copy editor for Radix magazine (and still is). Most magazines, maybe Christian ones especially, are deluged with poetry submissions "not quite ready for prime time." One day I saw editor-in-chief Sharon Gallagher toss a stack of them into her wastebasket without responding to the senders. I said, "Hey, you can't do that! Even an absolutely unpublishable poem may be somebody's dearest and best." Seeing that I was serious, she fished out the doomed poems and handed them to me. "Here," she said, "You take care of these." That's how I became the "Poetry Rejection Editor" of the magazine. Some poets regarded my tongue-in-cheek title as a slap in the face, but over the years they began to appreciate my efforts to encourage each one of them and offer a few suggestions. Usually my amateur critique of an amateur poem would go something like this: "Now, that's a good line (or phrase or word or metaphor); let's have more of that." Once in awhile, finding almost nothing of redeeming social value to praise, I had to fall back on, "Well, you've got the length about right." Eventually Sharon persuaded the widely published Christian poet Luci Shaw to be a real Poetry Editor for the magazine.

In a special 1980 poetry issue, Radix let me introduce about a dozen promising poets whose work I had found in the stacks of mail I sifted through. Only three or four of those talented young people had ever had a poem published before. Besides introducing them and their work in that issue, I contributed a "how-to" article that was like an essay on "the science of doing poetry," despite the fact that making a poem is an act of creation. Any creative activity, including scientific research, is governed by principles but not by rules to be followed exactly. If we had exact instructions to follow, we would be copying, not creating. That's also why we can speak of "the art of doing science."

A Laboratory Manual

My how-to article listed four qualities that help distinguish a poem from something else, or a good poem from a bad one. The best poems combine:

1) a definite rhythm;

2) evocative language rich in imagery;

3) unity of focus on a single idea or theme; and,

4) compactness or "tightness" in which every word must bear its freight.

5) Still, the most important criterion is that a poem has to "sound just right" and make sense when spoken aloud. Hearing seems to be the most basic avenue of human communication, because that's the way human infants develop language. We receive intelligence of the outside world through our ears long before we learn to read. Even after years of developing our visual sense, hearing poetry spoken aloud is more likely to stir us than anything we see or read―certainly more than most research papers in scientific journals.

Scientists have a problem here. We spend much of our lives in a largely "objective" mode, keeping ourselves aloof from feelings and out of the data as much as possible. We don't want to be stirred. We don't trust our emotions. Carry that too far and we turn ourselves into soulless machines. No wonder so many scientific societies today try to give science a human face. Christians trained in science have an advantage: we recognize our own humanity; we know that life is more than science. Yet to know a lot about the vast literature in our own language is not enough to humanize us; we must "feel it in our bones." Listening to live poetry readings is a help in that direction. I think that reading aloud our own poems, no matter how amateurish, takes us even further.

We get the word poem from the Greek ποεμα (literally, "something made"), the word the apostle Paul used in Ephesians 2:10 to describe Jesus' followers as God's "handiwork" (KJV). Making a poem takes a lot of work. Yet no matter how much effort poets expend in crafting their poems into final form, most of them speak of each poem as a gift. Such language resonates with Christians, who regard all things as gifts from God. It ought to resonate with scientists, too, since the word data comes directly from the Latin word for "given." Many great scientists have recognized that their best insights came to them from outside themselves. If we are sufficiently humble and open, poems may come to us.

A poem can begin from a striking metaphor, a bit of word-play, the kernel of a fresh concept or a new twist on an old one, or just a memorable cadence. Think of that gift as a seed to be planted and nourished to fruition. Don't abandon it; build on it. Like an airplane, a poem won't get off the ground unless the pilot goes through a sort of check-off list: Is the idea something I want to pursue? Are my words adequate to sustain the idea? Is the language rich enough to engage a listener's ear? Have I wandered away from that seed concept? Can I tighten the final product by getting rid of excess words or substituting a stronger word for a weaker one? Have I adhered to a rhythmic pattern, or perhaps intentionally deviated from it to keep it from being too predictable? Does the whole poem sound just right to me and to others? Is it time to quit?

We don't need to learn literary terms like "iambic pentameter" (which happens to be a sonnet's rhythmic pattern). All rhythms are made up of accented and unaccented syllables. Iambic meter sounds like the letter a in Morse code (dit-DAH), but there are other patterns whose names I forget, like n (DAH-dit) or u (dit-dit-DAH). In free verse, almost anything goes that sounds right, but even more rigid classical forms allow some wiggle-room. Poems can have two, three, four, or more beats per line. The pentameter of a sonnet requires five beats (DAHs) to each line, but I can get by with straying from the dit-DAH pattern with a few extra dits―if I don't overdo it. The accents should fall primarily on strong verbs or nouns rather than on weaker conjunctions or adjectives. As for rhymes, different schemes are possible, even for a sonnet. Rhythm and (often) rhyme are what make poetic lines memorable. The simplest sing-songy nursery rhymes stick in our minds throughout our lives.

Find a poem you like about something you care about and read it aloud over and over again until you get the "ring" of it. Or listen to a favorite hymn and use its pattern to write a stanza of your own. What's important is not to analyze a poem technically, but to roll up your sleeves and "get your hands dirty." You may not want to spread your first effort around, at least until you've tried reading it aloud to one or two trusted friends. Even better, get a friend to read your poem back to you. That's like sending a research paper to a peer-reviewed journal, hoping for a positive reaction to your work. You can see if your auditor/editor stumbles over any of your lines, and you may even get some helpful suggestions.

To begin, all we need is a single seed idea. Let's say that it comes to us as a rhythmic line. Now we need another line to amplify, illustrate, contrast, or play on that first one. Then we keep going. If the lines have a rhythm but don't fall into a regular pattern, call it free verse and keep going until it sounds finished, complete. It's good to put an unfinished poem away for awhile and come back to it fresh. Sometimes a poem will "come alive" and go where it wants to go, with us just tagging along. Your seed idea may not even make it into the final version. That's O.K. It will have served its purpose.

Trying to write a poem is an exercise in choosing just the right words from all possible words and arranging them in the most communicative way. Even if we find that we ourselves don't do it very well, the effort can give us an immense appreciation of what good writers do. That appreciation can lead us into reading great literature and perhaps eventually loving it. It can be the beginning of the liberal arts education we didn't have time for in college.

Would a course like "Literature for Scientists" be a good idea? Well, maybe. Scientists might learn a lot from such an experience—provided it's a hands-on, laboratory course.