1 - A Cartography of Crisis

Summary

At any given moment, an untold number of individuals around the world find themselves experiencing something that has been attested throughout human history: the conscious experience of divine activity, both within their own minds and elsewhere in the world. Prayer, meditation, worship, music, art, contemplation, even theological thinking – these are just a few of the avenues through which religious believers have sought either interaction with God or God’s intentional action in specific circumstances. Indeed, Christian scriptures and tradition portray a God who, while transcendent, is also immanent in the natural world – continually responsive to humans and the rest of creation, often to seemingly dramatic effect. Yet at the same moment, physicists, cosmologists, mathematicians, biologists, and cognitive scientists in laboratories and research centres around the world are increasingly discovering the sorts of verifiable, predictable, and empirical mechanisms that would account for the same phenomena experienced by religious believers as divine activity.