The Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion

I read The Luminous Web several years ago, and I keep coming back to it, and re-reading it. Barbara Brown Taylor is a uniquely gifted writer, and seer. And the way she wraps what she sees in words is poetic and profound. She dares to enter into the physical, and into the physics, and finds God so beautifully there. It was a spiritual experience for me to ride the wave of her words into a new way of seeing. To me, this book is a real classic.

One of the most lucid and reasoned disussions of science and religion that you'll find. I've read a number of the new science books, but by the end she had me. Not just a reasoned approach but a personal and moving account as well.

After hearing Prof Taylor's sermons and lectures, I needed to wade thru her Essays on Science and Religion. Especially true, when I read three widely divergent reviews ... It seemed that any review title using the Metaphor of "Like a Black Hole," was a bit too outlandish for anything our knowledgeable Prof. Taylor could conjure up to print! In my first encounters with references to Albert Einstein, then Robert John Russell and James McCord before noting Sir John Templeton on the same page... she then uses humorist Will Rogers' quote, "We're all ignorant, just on different subjects." She introduces Richard Feynman, one of our century's charismatic physicists, plus one of my generation who is familar to any native of Oak Ridge, Tennessee! She then proceeds to move thru the shortest chapter "The Evolution of Praise" heavy with the writers of Science. My favorite, most heavily under-lined Chapter is, "The Physics of Communion." After her statements from Albert Einstein, Galileo, Copernicus and Newton, she touches upon Niels Bohr, George Johnson, Fred Burnham, John Polkinghorne, even Alan Watts, Bennett Sims and Paul Tillich. How's that for a multi-colored team of biologists, mathematicians, physicists, philosophers, theologians and scientists? When Professor Taylor does her homework there is no such metaphor as that Black Hole! For me it is her 'Way-Out-of-the-Box' book worth 5 golden stars!

In The Luminous Web, Barbara Taylor describes her own journey as an Episcopal priest (holding the Harry R. Butman Chair in Religion and Philosophy at Piedmont College in Demorest, Georgia) trying to learn what the insights of quantum physics, the new biology, and chaos theory can teach the Christian believer. In explaining why the church should care about the new discovers and insights into the physical world that modern science has to offer, Taylor suggest ways that Christians might close the gap between spirit and matter, between the secular and the sacred. The Luminous Web is profoundly rewarding reading.

For those who love to read Mrs. Taylor's books or meditations in Christian Century will be in for a surprise. This is a collection of essays (4) that provide an excellent, easy to follow blend of scientific theory with theology. Taylor simplifies difficult scientific theories for the average person. For those of us trained as scientist with a strong faith based on personal encounters with the "awe" (Taylor's description of God), it was comforting. Her verbal dexterity expresses for me the many ideas and thoughts that I have pondered. I kept wanting to say "yes! that's what I would have said, if I had not been so limited by language deficit." Another must read book of her's is When God is Silent.