LOS ALAMOS FAITH & SCIENCE FORUM NEWS
The Los Alamos Faith and Science Forum invites you to our eighth annual summer program entitled “Why Do Faith and Reason Interact?” – this year again via Zooming.
Our lecture series will begin every Wednesday evening at 6:30 pm, starting on June 2 and running for 9 weeks, through July 28. These sessions will be available on the internet via Zoom. Information has already been sent to our members and previous years’ attendees. Otherwise, you can connect to these sessions using this link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83384636721?pwd=WDZHa08xaUhvVWRqd2NHTXcrYkxidz09
This summer’s series will again explore a wide range of issues at the forefront of the science-religion intersection. At the first session, we will remind our audience about the mechanics of ‘Zooming’ and Bob Reinovsky will then present an introduction to and relationship between the topics that will be presented throughout the summer. The summer series includes two talks on the foundations of modern science, two talks dealing with ethics related to science and religion, three talks related to Adam and Eve, and a final lecture on the very timely issue of vaccines.
Here is the schedule of the presentations:
June 2 “Why Do Faith and Reason Interact? An Introduction to the Summer Series” – Bob Reinovsky
June 9 “How Christianity Laid the Foundation for Modern Science … and many other things, such as human rights and individual freedom — Part I: The Psychology of Europe” – Nels Hoffman
June 16 “How Christianity Laid the Foundation for Modern Science … and many other things, such as human rights and individual freedom — Part II: The Work of the Church” – Nels Hoffman
June 23 “Ethics: The Common Ground Between Faith and Science” – Bob Dryja
June 30 “Ethics of Science Informing Theology” – Gerry Wood
July 7 “Scientific constraints on the Existence of Adam and Eve” – Chick Keller
July 14 “Christology without the ‘fall’: Do we need Adam and Eve? Impact on Jesus’ mission(s)” – Morrie Pongratz
July 21 “Adam and Eve’s origin and impact: How they fit into evolutionary history, why they are essential to religion, and how they enabled the explosive success of mankind” – Gary Stradling
July 28 “History of Vaccines and Christian Response” – Glenn Magelssen
During our first six summers, the Forum presented programs featuring Wednesday evenings of suppers, lectures, and discussions, based on specific themes and featuring highly recognized experts in areas at the intersection of religion and science. Last year, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, large gatherings and strong social interactions were not allowed. In response to this situation — while maintaining the desire to continue our tradition of a summer lecture series — we embraced electronic social media as our solution and used ‘Zoom’ to stream our talks out to all our previous participants as well as new people interested in these topics.
We continue this tradition for the 2021 summer series, with many of us now well experienced with this new mode of interaction and information exchange. Copies of the abstracts for this season’s presentations and (eventually) viewgraphs of the talks themselves can be found on our website: www.lafsf.org . If restrictions on gatherings are sufficiently relaxed by mid-summer, we hope to try to return to a live event at the Unitarian Church in Los Alamos by the end of our summer program.