Word: teilhard
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This aura of inexorability has led some people to wax poetic about cosmic purpose. The Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, writing at midcentury, long before the Internet, nonetheless discerned a "thinking envelope of the earth" that he dubbed the "noosphere." This was the divinely ordained outcome of the two evolutions, and would lead to "Point Omega," where brotherly love would reign supreme...
...nearly a half-century after Teilhard's death, we have cause to be less sanguine about this noosphere business. Viewing the noosphere up close and personal--from the inside--we can see that its potential for good and evil is about equal. The Internet can unite people across distance, but it is indifferent to whether they are chess players, crusading environmentalists or neo-Nazis...
...image of a literal planetary nervous system was laid out a half-century ago as a kind of prophecy by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit mystic whose writings were banned by the Roman Catholic Church. Teilhard envisioned the technological evolution of a "noosphere"--the "thinking envelope of the Earth." The noosphere, he believed, entails a "sort of etherized universal consciousness" that will lead us, at last, to an era of brotherly love. Needless to say, Teilhard has a following...
...Teilhard right? Is the Internet God's will? For all we know, yes. But bear in mind that this is not the first time an information technology has been nominated for that honor. The art of printing, wrote Martin Luther, was "God's highest and extremest act of grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven forward...
...storefront training school for World War II vets called the New Haven Restaurant Institute, with an enrollment of 16 and a staff of three. In 1972 it moved from Connecticut to its present home: a hulking, red brick former Jesuit seminary, St. Andrew's-on-the-Hudson. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the great theologian, is buried there. Stained- glass windows depicting scenes from the life of Christ adorn a student dining hall that was once the seminary's chapel. It also contains a fresco of the Last Supper, boarded up for safekeeping...