"To recover a spiritual tradition in which creation, and the study of creation, matters would be to inaugurate new possibilities between spirituality and science that would shape the paradigms for culture, its institution, and its people"
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Fox is smuggling a quiet revolution into a sentence that sounds like a mission statement. “Recover a spiritual tradition” signals dissatisfaction with the modern bargain: science gets the real world, spirituality gets the private feelings. His wager is that this split is not inevitable; it’s a cultural choice, reinforced by institutions that treat wonder as unserious unless it can be graphed, and treat devotion as suspect unless it stays out of the lab.
The key maneuver is in “creation, and the study of creation.” Fox isn’t using “creation” as a cudgel in the creationism-versus-evolution fight. He’s trying to rehabilitate creation as a shared object of attention: the cosmos as something you can both investigate and revere. Pairing it with “study” is strategic. It grants science its authority while refusing the idea that meaning is a contaminant. Subtext: spirituality doesn’t have to be an anti-intellectual refuge; it can be a disciplined way of relating to reality, with ethics and awe baked in.
“Inaugurate new possibilities” reads like an invitation, but also a rebuke to tired paradigms: religion as rulebook, science as machine for extraction. Fox’s background in “creation spirituality” and his conflicts with Catholic hierarchy matter here. He’s arguing for a post-dogmatic sacredness rooted in the world itself, one that could reroute culture: how we educate, what institutions reward, what kinds of people we produce. The line is aspirational, but it’s also political: if reverence and empiricism stop being enemies, consumerist and technocratic defaults start to look less inevitable.
The key maneuver is in “creation, and the study of creation.” Fox isn’t using “creation” as a cudgel in the creationism-versus-evolution fight. He’s trying to rehabilitate creation as a shared object of attention: the cosmos as something you can both investigate and revere. Pairing it with “study” is strategic. It grants science its authority while refusing the idea that meaning is a contaminant. Subtext: spirituality doesn’t have to be an anti-intellectual refuge; it can be a disciplined way of relating to reality, with ethics and awe baked in.
“Inaugurate new possibilities” reads like an invitation, but also a rebuke to tired paradigms: religion as rulebook, science as machine for extraction. Fox’s background in “creation spirituality” and his conflicts with Catholic hierarchy matter here. He’s arguing for a post-dogmatic sacredness rooted in the world itself, one that could reroute culture: how we educate, what institutions reward, what kinds of people we produce. The line is aspirational, but it’s also political: if reverence and empiricism stop being enemies, consumerist and technocratic defaults start to look less inevitable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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