Preface

We recently heard with great sadness the news that Archbishop Józef M. Życiński died unexpectedly in Rome on February 10, 2011. He was Archbishop of Lublin, Poland, Grand Chancellor of the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, and was connected to this journal as a member of its editorial board and as the author of "Evolution and Christian Thought in Dialog according to the Teaching of John Paul II" in our Winter 2006 issue (9:1). Archbishop Życiński recently articulated well the larger intellectual purpose served by a journal such as Logos in an interview in Perspectives, published by the Center for Catholic Studies at the University of St. Thomas: "It is important to provide intellectual and cultural alternatives to the 'dictatorship of relativism' by presenting contemporary culture with the contributions of Christian thinkers." He went on to emphasize "the inspiring and transformative Christian role in contemporary debates," and called upon Logos to do what it could to enhance the possibility of cultural transformation through encounters between the Catholic intellectual tradition and all areas of contemporary culture, and in particular asked us to "continue and expand its engagement in the dialogue with science."¹

Few Church leaders were as well prepared as Archbishop Życiński to exercise leadership in the contemporary dialogue between Catholicism and science, and few have been more effective. The dialogue with science is a central and indispensable component of the larger contemporary dialogue between faith and culture, particularly because the development of modernity is intertwined with the development of modern science and because the technological transformation of the modern world based on science continues to be one of the most obvious features of the contemporary cultural landscape. But this dialogue is especially urgent because a widespread but shallow account of the rise of modernity holds that this development is due to some kind of victory of scientific thinking over religious thinking. Such accounts have been voiced loudly and frequently in recent years.

In his previously mentioned article in Logos, Archbishop Życiński developed some of the work of Pope John Paul II to demonstrate the danger posed both by religious fundamentalism in its rejection of science and by scientific fundamentalism in its failure to recognize the legitimacy of a religious understanding and experience of the world. Too often, scientific claims are made in a reductionist mode that inculcate blindness to the depth of human experience through "the attempt . . . to subordinate even the most sublime realms of human experience to uncomplicated mechanisms." Following John Paul's lead in this regard, Archbishop Życiński called upon religion and science to enrich and challenge one another in contemporary intellectual life.

The archbishop has left us with a brilliant and extended demonstration of the engagement between Catholic theology and contemporary science in a book translated in 2006, God and Evolution: Fundamental Questions of Christian Evolutionism.² As he explains in the introduction, interdisciplinary dialogue plays a necessary role in achieving a new understanding of the harmonious relationship between scientific theories of the origin of the human species and Christian faith. The concept of dialogue is understood rigorously in this context—Życiński is not merely offering admonitions to the world of science that it not overstep its legitimate intellectual bounds when asserting its claims (although such admonitions have a place here) but demonstrating how dialogue in this area must be deeply informed by a strong understanding of modern biology and physics brought into an engagement with the best theological thinking. This concept of dialogue marks the continuation of the long-standing Catholic intellectual tradition in which the best rational understanding of the world that human culture can produce is brought into fruitful engagement with philosophy and Christian revelation and as a result a developed harmonious understanding of culture and faith emerges.

Życiński notes that there are obstacles to such a dialogue that must be addressed and overcome. Christian fundamentalism committed to literal interpretations of the biblical account of creation in Genesis marks one persistent cultural strand that must be negated so that faith is prepared to engage openly with the discoveries and insights of...