Word: chardin
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...vitality to survive as it was much longer. His description of certain Catholic intellectuals of the '50s-with their enthusiasm for Merton and monasticism, Gregorian chant and the social encyclicals of the Popes-is witty but a bit condescending. As for the '60s, Teilhard de Chardin's cloudy, evolutionary mysticism gets no more praise than Pope John. Wills argues that both men did not fully see the consequences when they attempted to generalize or make programs from their private convictions...
...Christian and Catholic themes exemplified by the ministry of Jesus Christ and--in Latin America--practiced even by a significant portion of the established Church. Friere has read widely among theologians, and his combination of two of the most important theological influences on his thinking and action--Teilhard de Chardin and Reinhold Niebur--reflect his fundamental Christian outlook and his emphasis on praxis...
Teilhard de Chardin was a French Jesuit and paleontologist by profession, co-discoverer of the "Peking Man." He wrote extensively throughout his life and his theology is based on a vision of the cosmic evolution of man proceeding from the alpha point--base matter--to the omega point--the union of man and God in God's perfectness. Freire borrows this cosmic optimism for the future of man but tempers it with the political realism of Reinhold Niebur, an American Protestant theologian. Friere and Neibur feel that the cosmic evolution of man can become pathologically fixated at a certain point...
...from the moment of its miraculous genesis three billion years ago, life has been continually renewing and remaking itself, an evolutionary process that has led to the appearance of a unique creature quite unlike any of those before him. Thinking, feeling, striving, man is what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called "the ascending arrow of the great biological synthesis...
...molecular biology. In one sense, the new findings have continued the work of Newton, Darwin and Freud, reducing men to even tinier cogs in a mechanistic universe. At the same time, it was man himself who deciphered the code of life and who can now, in Teilhard de Chardin's phrase, "seize the tiller of the world." If he is only a bundle of DNA-directed cells, more sophisticated but hardly dissimilar from those of animals and plants, he can at least use that knowledge to improve, even to re-create himself. But should...