The Universe Really Is "Inspirited Matter" - Richard Rohr

I was reviewing some of the many pithy passages in Richard Rohr's book, Falling Upward, this morning.  Read it back in 2012.  So many concise, thoughtful insights that get me in the gut.  Here's one sample lifted from my Kindle:

Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life (Richard Rohr)
- Highlight Loc. 1564-71 | Added on Friday, May 04, 2012, 08:07 AM

The gift of living in our time, however, is that we are more and more discovering that the sciences, particularly physics, astrophysics, anthropology, and biology, are confirming many of the deep intuitions of religion, and at a rather quick pace in recent years. The universe really is “inspirited matter,” we now know, and is not merely inert. Now we might call it instinct, evolution, nuclear fusion, DNA, hardwiring, the motherboard, healing, growth, or just springtime, but nature clearly continues to renew itself from within. God seems to have created things that continue to create and recreate themselves from the inside out. It is no longer God's one-time creation or evolution; rather, God's form of creation precisely is evolution. Finally God is allowed to be fully incarnate, which was supposed to be Christianity's big trump card from the beginning! 

For many years I could not perceive how this could be.  The beginning of my breakthrough was reading The Marriage of Sense and Soul by Ken Wilber in the fall of 1999.  Another important step was reading A New Kind of Christian by Brian McLaren followed by his other books.  And also thanks to Teilhard du Chardin with help from his interpreters John Haught (eg. Deeper Than Darwin) and Ilia Delio (The Emergent Christ and Christ in Evolution), as well as Philip Clayton (The Re-Emergence of Emergence), Harold Morowitz (The Emergence of Everything), The Language of God by Francis Collins and the Biologos Website and many others,  it makes sense to me.

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Why Are There Atheists?

Have been reviewing my Kindle bookmarks just now.  Don't remember underlining this but in a short booklet on Thomas Aquinas this jumped out at me.

Thomas Aquinas in 50 Pages: A Layman's Quick Guide to Thomism (Taylor Marshall)
- Highlight Loc. 484-85 | Added on Friday, October 30, 2015, 12:15 PM

Usually, atheists or heretics are what they are because of scandal and moral scruples, not because of logical failures.

Have forgotten the context for this.  I recall in the early part of one of Brian McLaren's books, I think Generous Orthodoxy, he says that many of the liberal christians he has met are former fundamentalists or conservatives who've been through bad experiences.

Owen Barfield, C. S. Lewis and the Purpose of Argument

Somewhere I've read that C. S. Lewis is the closest thing that Evangelical Christians have to a Saint. In the past year I've been studying an interesting person who was a very close friend of his by the name of Owen Barfield.  They were so very close that Lewis mentioned Barfield in the dedication to his book, The Allegory of Love (1936) as the 'wisest and best of my unofficial teachers'.  Later Lewis dedicated the first Narnian chronicle to Lucy, Barfield's adopted daughter.  A short web search can easily be found describing this, such as here.

I first read Barfield's Saving Appearances: A Study in Idolatry earlier in the year.  It was difficult to understand.  I even read it again a few months later.  In order to proceed, I decided upon Re-Weaving the Rainbow:  The Thought of Owen Barfield.  This collection of essays has been a help.  A variety of topics are discussed.  Yesterday the thought below jumped out at me.  It is lifted from my Kindle.

Re-Weaving the Rainbow: The Thought of Owen Barfield (David Lavery)
- Highlight Loc. 7447-48 | Added on Saturday, January 02, 2016, 11:27 PM

Barfield doubts that he changed Lewis more than Lewis changed him. But of one thing he is certain and on this he and Lewis would be in agreement: "In our arguments we always, both of us, were arguing for truth not for victory, and arguing for truth, not for comfort."

If I understand properly, this quote originally comes from the book "Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis".