Francis puts environment above short-term politics Sometime in April 1226, lying acutely ill in the grounds of St Clare’s San Damiano convent, St Francis of Assisi wrote the Cantico di fratre sole, the Canticle of Brother Sun. Nowadays we sing it as ‘All Creatures of Our God and King’. It is a cosmic hymn of praise to God in which the whole natural world joins. Francis’ biographer, Thomas of Celano, says that all God’s creatures ‘filled Francis with wondrous and unspeakable joy as he beheld the sun, or raised his eyes to the moon, or gazed on the stars, and the firmament...Even towards little worms he glowed with exceeding love... he used to pick them up...and put them in a safe place, that they might not be crushed.’ Conscious of his own approaching death, the saint sings: ‘Praise to thee, O Lord, for our sister mortal death, from whom no one may escape.’ Laudatio si gives no comfort to global warming deniers. Francis has little patience for technological solutions and ‘fixes’. Laudatio si needs a good editor. Comments Submitted comments
The What and How of Ultimate Questions – 2011 Conference Blog | Dialogue Australasia Network What are the ‘Ultimate Questions’ that you explore in the classroom with your students? How do you engage them in the questioning process? These are two of the key questions delegates will explore together at the 2011 DAN Conference (18-20 April, Newington College, Stanmore). We’ll be presenting a ‘Making it Happen’ workshop at the Conference: The Religion & Science Conversation in the Middle and Senior School Classroom. Two units of work and associated resources will be shared, and there will be an opportunity to question and discuss teaching practice in this interesting area of Philosophy & Religious Studies. We’d like to get the conversation started before the Conference, and give both delegates and the wider DAN audience an opportunity to join in. We have posted a few questions to get you started. For each of the questions you could suggest ways of getting students involved in thinking them through. Questions: Join the conversation by adding a comment below……
Catholic Education Resource Center Whispers in the Loggia ethics The religion of environmentalism As I have often noted, the most dynamic and influential religion of the past hundred years has not been Christianity, let alone Judaism, the two religions that created the Western world. Nor has it been Islam. It has been Leftism. Leftism has influenced the literary, academic, media and, therefore, the political elite far more than any other religion. For most of that time, various incarnations of Marxism have been the dominant expressions – and motivators – of Leftism: specifically, income redistribution, material equality and socialism. Nothing comes close to environmentalism in generating left-wing enthusiasm. This was most graphically displayed by the infamous Time magazine cover of April 21, 2008, that altered the most iconic photograph in American history – Joe Rosenthal’s picture of the Marines planting the flag on Iwo Jima. This is the antithesis of the Judeo-Christian view of the world that has dominated Western civilization for all of the West’s history. This is the trend.
The Text This Week - Revised Common Lectionary, Scripture Study and Worship Links The Religion Teacher | Catholic Religious Education Machine ethics: The robot’s dilemma Peter Adams The fully programmable Nao robot has been used to experiment with machine ethics. In his 1942 short story 'Runaround', science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov introduced the Three Laws of Robotics — engineering safeguards and built-in ethical principles that he would go on to use in dozens of stories and novels. They were: 1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; 2) A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; and 3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws. Fittingly, 'Runaround' is set in 2015. Geoff Marsh speaks to Boer Deng about designing robots to handle moral dilemmas “We see more and more autonomous or automated systems in our daily life,” said panel participant Karl-Josef Kuhn, an engineer with Siemens in Munich, Germany. Learning machines Jiiji Press/AFP/Getty