Mary Conrow Coelho

Contemporary Westerners are caught between contradictory ways of understanding the world: science and faith are seemingly incompatible. When we experience spiritual openings, when the Presence breaks through our lives, what do we make of it? Mary Conroe Coelho, who has studied both science and theology, interprets for Friends a "new way of seeing." By incorporating scientific breakthroughs which challenge the limits of a materialistic worldview and progressive thinking on the frontiers of theology, she offers a fresh perspective on the place of sacredness in the world and in our own lives.… (mer)

This pamphlet is a profound explanation of a foundation for Quaker faith and practice based on modern science. The new science that she cites, including quantum physics, indeterminacy theory, cosmology, evolutionary biology, and ecology, invites us to embrace and celebrate a profoundly changed worldview, one no longer based on the materialist, rationalist, and reductionist implications of older science that imply a "disenchanted world." She explains an interpretation of the newer science that affirms a harmony between religion and science, and implies the reality of the sacred presence inherent in the structure of the universe and the validity of inward experience of the numinous. It supports Friends' experience of the Inward Light, guidance and leadings from the Inward Teacher, unity in the Truth, and the call to Friends' testimonies of integrity, peace, love, justice, community.
She finds various implications, including for healing (as healing and experience of the numinous seem to contribute to each other), and of course for ecological witness, as the understanding of the sacred within all the universe and its hidden unity negate the commodification of the natural world and thus our assault upon it. And she sees in the new worldview a call for Quaker renewal and participation in the creative evolutionary potential of the universe.
Of course, many Friends and others may not need the support of the new science to understand and recognize the reality and nature of spiritual reality. Nevertheless, her explanation points to implications that may be fresh, important, and revitalizing for us. And of course these implications of the new science can be profoundly important for the many who have found real barriers to spiritual experience and awareness in the rationalistic "disenchantment" of the world.
I found this pamphlet fascinating, carefully thought out and packed densely with important points, perhaps too densely for such a small space. By the way, it seems to me that this pamphlet (among numerous others) is the very kind of thing that Kenneth Boulding called for in 1964 as part of the evolution of the Religious Society of Friends (see PHP #136).
It may be a comment on the sorry state of our predominant culture of science and religion that I feel called upon to say that this does not at all seem to be some crackpot view of science. Those who wish to pursue this further can find the sources cited in her bibliography and her 2012 book on the subject.… (mer)