The Gene Particle?

"In a recent interview on his Mars Hill Audio Journal, Ken Myers talked to Craig Holdrege, co-author of Beyond Biotechnology. One of Holdrege’s key points is that scientists have moved well beyond the early idea that the gene is the “unmoved mover” that determines everything about an organism, and they now recognize that genes, too, have a history and are interdependent on other factors in the organism.

Thus falls yet another form of that enduring quest to find some point of changelessness that can account for al change. Thus falls, too, the entire technical effort to manipulate genes to undo human frailty.

Not that the quest will cease. Its motives are ultimately religious. Like every idolatry, it is restless, as it forges ever onward, hoping to discover, down some unexplored path, an Archimedean point other than the eternal Word in whom all things subsist."

Citation: Leithart, Peter J. From the “Quodlibet” department in “Touchstone” magazine. January/February 2011. Page 5.

Relationship Wreck

Peter Leithart makes these insightful (as usual) comments on the tweeks in what we mean by relationships:

"British sociologist Anthony Giddens has commented on the rise of what he calls “pure relationships.” A “pure relationship” is one in which “the relationship exists solely for whatever rewards that relationship as such can deliver.” A pure relationship has no external anchors or supports, but depends entirely on the commitment of the two who enter the relationship. 

Today, for example, we distinguish friendships from working relationships and family relations, thinking of a friend “specifically as someone with whom one has a relationship unprompted by anything other than the rewards that the relationship provides." 

In recent decades, marriage has increasingly come to be seen as a pure relationship, one that is “initiated for, and kept going for as long as it delivers emotional satisfaction." This is not, of course, how marriage was understood in earlier centuries: “Marriage was a contract, often initiate by parents or relatives rather than by the marital partners themselves,"  and in the Church, marriage was seen as having a “sacramental” character, even when it was not technically understood as a sacrament. 

The dangers go even deeper, however, since American Christians often regard their relationship with God on the model of “pure relationship.” When an Evangelical speaks of a “personal relationship with Jesus,” he’s not talking about a liturgically and catechetically formed relationship, surrounded by the supports of fellow believers, rituals, signs, and texts.  He’s talking about self-standing, free-floating, pure relationship, one made all the more unstable by the fact that one of the parties is not visible."

Citation: Leithart, Peter J. From the “Quodlibet” department in “Touchstone” magazine. June 2009. Page 5.