Trinity Forum: My Exoplanet — Science & Religion

Trinity Episcopal Church in Concord invites you to its Sunday morning Adult Forum, Trinity's adult education program, which meets weekly at 9 AM to hear speakers connect us to these topics: word, worship, wonder, world, and witness, five important aspects of our Christian life.

On Sunday, April 15 at 9 AM we focus on "wonder" as Paul H Carr speaks on the topic "My Exoplanet: Science and Religion."   In 1584, Dominican monk Giordano Bruno envisioned the stars as "countless suns with countless earths, all rotating around their suns.” Searching for intellectual freedom, he fled his native Italy to Protestant Switzerland and Germany, but in 1600 the Roman Inquisition condemned him for heresy. He was burned at the stake.
 
It took 400 years for telescope technology to advance and for Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Bradley, and Foucault to establish heliocentric cosmology, culminating in today’s astrophysics with digital imaging and processing. Contrasting with Bruno, in 2010 Dominican Francisco Ayala won the $1.6M Templeton Prize for affirming life’s spiritual dimension.
 
Speaker Paul H. Carr, with degrees from MIT and Brandeis, won a Templeton Foundation grant for his science and religion courses at University of Massaschusetts/Lowell. These inspired his book “Beauty in Science and Spirit” (2006), summarized on his web page www.MirrorOfNature.org. From 1967–1995, he led a branch at the AF Research Laboratory at Hanscom AFB.  Dr. Carr has over written over 80 scientific papers and holds 10 patents contributed to the development of surface acoustic wave components for radar, TV, and cell phones.

Trinity's invited Forum speakers come from many walks of life and have addressed all manner of topics. Among our recent topics are pilgrimage, faith lost and found, histories and Biblical persons, death, dying and grieving, parenting, stewardship, education, and much more.

Childcare begins in Trinity's nursery at 9 AM; Trinity's buildings are fully accessible.  For further information on this or other programs at Trinity, please call our Parish Office, 978/369-3715, or visit us on-line at http://www.trinityconcord.org.