The Collegeville Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research requests a grant from the John Templeton Foundation for a project titled The Way the World Is: Cosmology and the Practice of Ministry. The grant's title is borrowed from the title of an exemplary book written for a broad audience by John Polkinghome.
The grant, to be implemented over a three-year period, is designed to develop a pedagogical model and related materials that will help pastors integrate the findings of science with faith's reasoning about "the way the world is." Knowledge gained through the project's achievements will guide pastors in their work as theological leaders of communities, particularly as they themselves integrate issues of faith and science within their congregations. The Collegeville Institute intends that the integrative work advanced by the project will provide pastors, their communities, and others whom the community touches, with a useable cosmology—a reasoned and compelling understanding of the cosmos as interpreted by both scientists and theologians. The Institute also intends that its work will stimulate those influenced by the project to develop an appetite for furthering their understanding of the relationship between faith and science, and of the ways science and theology can be integrated into a fuller understanding of the cosmos.
Drafting consultations are at the heart of the Way the World Is project. Each consultation, one of which will be held each year for three years, will center on a region of scientific work relevant to the development of a useable cosmology. The materials and methods of scientists and a theologians, their understandings of laws and conceptual novelty, and their views of the goals of science and theology, will be taken up in a consultation on The Task of Knowing in Science and Religion. A second consultation on The Universe will examine from religious and scientific perspectives the origins of the universe, cosmic order, and time and cosmos, and the end of all things. In a third consultation on Matter and Life participants will consider the building blocks of reality, the emergence and development of life, and human identity, particularly in relationship with recent discoveries in neuroscience.
Through the development out of these consultations of adult education materials and other resources for pastors and congregations, along with educational programs designed to disseminate this work to mainline and moderate evangelical congregations around the country, the Institute aims to help pastors perceive ways of accounting for the way the world is in their congregational setting, in sermons, adult education programs, and articles and essays written for an audience beyond the boundaries of their congregations. The Institute expects that the Way the World Is will help increasing numbers of Christians to internalize a cosmological model that attempts to integrate faith and science, instead of seeing the two as in a state of continual conflict. Most importantly, the project seeks to bring Christians, among others, to feel at home, rather than lost, in a cosmos, knowable by both faith and science, that is "from the foundations," God's creation.
