Developing a healthy air of insouciance and ironic detachment is necessary to maintain sanity in these voluble times. Either this or turn it all off.
Monday, August 11, 2025
Any book worth banning is worth reading. But what's the point of banning when no one reads anymore anyway. Actually reading The Bible, Huckleberry Finn, and The Grapes of Wrath makes you a super intellectual over everyone else.
The title is a play on words. Reich, the Sec. of Labor under President Clinton, is short in stature and says he's been insulted all of his life for being so short.
Reich was born in the 40's in the same time frame as the Clintons and Donald Trump, whom he despises of course.
He is the only person whom I've heard of who was expelled from kindergarten. :)
Reich's father was an outspoken Democrat but independent, an impossible position today.
Reich grew up in a small town 60 miles north of NYC called South Salem. P. 16
"The year my father turned forty I became desperately afraid he would die." He made repeated literary recitations regarding the passage of time, about how fleeting time was and how temporary it was. P. 36
I think about this on August 10, 2025, remembering 8/10/67.
8/11/25 Best book of the year so far.
Great summary of Ayn Rand and presentation of the "common good."
Unexpected description of Dartmouth early 60's.
Getting cussed out by Robert Kennedy. P. 73
Meeting Bill Clinton on the way to England. P, 81
Facing the sword of Damocles---the draft P. 83
THE RIOT THAT STARTED THE CULTURE WARS P. 93
The author dates the beginning of the culture wars as May 8, 1970, the date of the 25th anniversary of the Allied victory over Germany in WWII. It was also the week after Nixon invaded Cambodia, and four days after four student were gunned down on the Kent State campus, A riot broke out in NYC between youthful young people, mostly students, and police and hardhats, cheered on by Nixon and friends.
The hardhat riot was the first salvo in American's culture wears and it had been planned in the Oval Office.
Nixon's hatchet man was Chuck Colson, P. 94
This could have moved blue-collar voters over to the Republican party.
"The hardhat riot revealed a deep split in America's left that had begun to show itself during the 1968 Democratic Convention ----dividing the coalition of workers and progressives that FDR had knitted together in the 1930's. It showed that working class whites could be peeled away from middle class liberals and college educated professionals on cultural issues involving nationalism and class as well as race and gender. P. 95
Talk of stakeholders and shareholder value. Still relevant? P. 142
8-15-25 Book of the Year
The declining of the working class and their amazing consolidation with Trump & the Republicans and ascendency of plutocracy taking over the country. It's quite amazing and tragic from the Democratic perspective. P. 146
REICH IS NOW APPEADRING ONLINE AS A DEMOCRATIC SPOKESPERSON.
The story of Bill Clinton gearing up to run for President. P. 156
Reich meets Sen. Alan Simpson. Same sense of humor. P. 219
The start of a beautiful friendship, the arch Republican and the very liberal Democrat. P. 221
Alan Simpson died 3-14-25 at the age of 93.
Until then I had no idea you were so gullible, Alan. (Regarding the 2008 financial collapse)
Reich distinguishes Fascism and Authoritarianism
#FASCISM rejects democracy, the rule of law, and equal rights under the law in favor of a strongman who interprets the popular will.
#The galvanizing of popular rage against cultural elites.
#Nationalism based on a dominant "superior" race and historic bloodlines.
#Extolling brute strength and heroic warriors. "I am your warrior."
Fascism depends on organized bullying. War and violence are necessary means of stregthening society by culling the weak and extolling heroic warriors.
#Disdaining women and non-standard forms of gender identity and sexual orientation.
Hierarchy and order is authoritarianism.
#The particular order of male dominance. The fascist heroic model is male.
The Republican Party showcases the essential elements of Fascism.
P. 282 - 285
The true meaning of patriotism is the opposite of Trump's exclusionary white male Christian nationalism In the last three-quarters of a century we have seen we have seen America's idea of inclusion more of a reality. Incremental progress toward equal rights for women, Black people, immigrants, Native Americans, Latinos, LGBTQ+, Muslims, Jews, atheists, and agnostics. Much work needs go be done, but America is far better for the progress.we've made. P. 316 - 317
The author closes the book with a touching and poignant remembrance of his teaching career. It sounds like he was certainly unorthodox in the classroom.
Born in 1946 , Reich is a traditional print person like me, but unlike me he is will to bend to the times to communicate with Gen Z. I would not do this. At the suggestion of his son Sam he starts making videos and other visual media to popularize his message in place of print to appeal to the younger generation. I would never do this!
Monday, August 4, 2025
(7 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
The Book of James in a Nutshell
August 2, 2025
Bart Ehrman
In this “New Testament in a Nutshell” thread I come now to the intriguing book of James, long one of my favorites among the Catholic epistles. At one point in my earlier existence, I liked the book so well that I memorized it. Don’t ask me to recite it now; that was 50 years ago.
Even so, I still think it is a terrific book. And now I realize it is intriguing for all sorts of reasons I never would have imagined back when I was able to recite it at a drop of the hat.
I start here with a one-sentence, fifty-word summary.
The Book of James consists of ethical instruction for followers of Jesus who are to live in ways pleasing to God as a way of demonstrating their faith, since anyone who thinks they can be saved only through what they believe does not understand that “faith without works is dead.”
For the rest of this post, I will summarize the major themes and emphases of this short, five-chapter book, which, hey, you too can memorize.
***********************
James consists of a series of ethical admonitions to those “who believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ” (James 2:1). It is a letter in form, at least partially: it begins with a prescript that names the author and contains a greeting. There is no epistolary conclusion, however, and the “letter” gives no indication of a specific occasion. It is instead a collection of pieces of good advice to those who “believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ” (2:1).
There is some question concerning the identity of the book’s author. He gives his name as James, but then does not tell us which James he is. In my next post I’ll be explaining why he almost certainly wants his readers to think he is James the brother of Jesus; and I’ll also be argueing that he almost certainly was someone else wanting his readres to think that he was that James.
Whoever the author actually was, he fills his book with ethical exhortations to his readers, many of which appear to reflect (although they never quote) traditions of Jesus’ own teaching as found, for example, in the Gospel of Matthew. Here too believers are urged not to swear oaths, but to let their “yes be yes” and their “no be no” (James 5:12; cf. Matt 5:33–37); we learn that loving one’s neighbor fulfills the Law (2:8; cf. Matt 22:39–40); and that those who are rich should fear the coming judgment (5:1–6; cf. Matt 19:23–24). One of the most striking features of the book, however, is that Jesus himself is scarcely ever mentioned.
Apart from 1:1, the epistolary opening, and 2:1, the verse quoted earlier, Jesus makes no appearance by name. What is even more intriguing is that, apart from these two verses, almost none of the ideas in the book are uniquely Christian. The various ethical injunctions have numerous parallels, for instance, in non-Christian Jewish writings; and all of the examples of ethical behavior are drawn from stories of the Hebrew Bible (Abraham 2:21; Rahab 2:25; Job 5:11; Elijah 5:17) rather than from the life of Jesus or the activities of his apostles. Even the communities of believers that are addressed appear in Jewish guise—they are described as “the twelve tribes in the Dispersion,” and their place of assembly is literally called a “synagogue” (2:2).
For these reasons, some scholars have argued that James is a kind of Jewish book of wisdom (somewhat like the book of Proverbs but without as many one-liners) with only a thin Christian veneer. According to this opinion, the author took over a piece of Jewish writing and “Christianized” it by adding a couple of references to Jesus.
Not everyone is persuaded by this point of view, however. Many scholars, for example, have observed that a large number of the admonitions in James have particularly close parallels with Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7). In addition, portions of the book relate closely to other teachings of Jesus (compare, e.g., James 4:13–15 with Jesus’ parable of the rich fool in Luke 12:16–21).
How, then, does one account for the general nature of these admonitions—that is, the fact that most of them are not distinctively Christian—and for their close similarities to older traditions about Jesus? It may be that the author strung together a number of important ethical admonitions that could be found in a variety of settings, such as Jewish wisdom literature and traditions of Jesus’ own teaching, and has applied them to the Christian communities that he is addressing.
James particularly emphasizes that those who have faith need to manifest it in the way they live (1:22–27; 2:14–26). Other recurring themes include the importance of controlling one’s “tongue” (i.e., one’s speech; 1:26; 3:1–12), the danger of riches for believers (1:9–11; 4:13–17; 5:1–6), and the need to be patient in the midst of suffering (1:2–8, 12–16; 5:7–11). The author, however, is not concerned only with what we might call individual ethics. Near the end of the book, he turns to address communal activities within the church as well, giving his readers advice about saying prayers, singing psalms, anointing the sick with oil, confessing sins, and restoring those who have strayed from the faith (5:13–16).
In many ways, the book of James is best known for its insistence that it is not possible to have faith apart from doing “good works, and for the polemical tone of the book in some of its key passages. It clearly is directed against notions advanced by other Christians this author considers aberrant. In particular he appears to take digs either at Paul or his later followers over the idea that a person can be “justified” by faith alone without reflecting that faith in their life. For this author true faith will always be manifest in one’s life, especially in the ways one treats the poor and the oppressed. To put it in his own words, “a person is justified by works and not by faith alone” (James 2:24) because “faith without works is dead” (2:26).
Was this author really James the brother of Jesus? Was he writing in direct opposition to Paul and his theological views of salvation? These are issues we will address in the following posts.
One of the discouraging aspects of life today is that with our 20 second attention spans nobody listens to anything I say anymore. Either that or they don’t care what I have to say. Either that or they don’t remember what I have to say. Either that or they misunderstand what I say. Maybe that’s my fault, but in my defense, it is sometimes hard to boil it down to the 50 word vocabulary of some people. I only speak now when necessary.
When the late Pope Francis was elected, a dozen years ago, and famously declined the pomp and perquisites typically associated with the office, among his renunciations was the use of the papal summer residence—a seventeenth-century palazzo in Castel Gandolfo, about fifteen miles south of Rome. Generations of Popes had enjoyed the use of the mansion, which overlooks a volcanic lake and is surrounded by spectacular terraced gardens. The palazzo is now a museum where visitors can admire a gallery of papal portraits, of varying quality, and imagine the dreams that visited the successive occupants of the papal bedroom, with its narrow twin bed. Castel Gandolfo is also home to one of the Holy See’s more unexpected institutions: the Vatican Observatory, which since its founding, in 1891, has been dedicated to the scientific study of the heavens.
Guy Consolmagno, the director of the observatory, first came to Castel Gandolfo as a newly minted Jesuit brother, in 1993. When I met him outside the palazzo, early this spring, he gestured at a window overlooking the building’s courtyard. This was the location of his first, decidedly modest bedroom in the mansion. Consolmagno, who grew up in suburban Detroit and retains a buoyant, emphatic, Midwestern manner, told me, “The Pope then was John Paul II, and when he was first elected he had made a rookie mistake, as we say in America. Somebody, a journalist—one of those terriblejournalists—had asked him, ‘What’s your favorite hymn?’ And, being a fool, he actually gave the name of a hymn that he happened to like. So, every Sunday during the summertime, when he was living here, the doors would open at 10 a.m., and this place would be filled with two thousand Polish pilgrims singing that hymn underneath my window. I got totally sick of it.” Consolmagno never got sick, though, of being saluted by the Swiss Guards stationed at the palace gates.
Consolmagno, who has a prodigious white beard, wavy gray bangs, and dark, beetling eyebrows, is one of fifteen scientists who currently make up the scholarly staff of the Vatican Observatory—all Jesuits and, inevitably, all men. (Their meals, perhaps equally inevitably, are prepared by a local woman.) At any given moment, about half of the fraternity is in Castel Gandolfo, which has been the institution’s home since the nineteen-thirties—although, for the past fifteen-odd years, the staff’s living quarters have been situated in a former convent a short distance from the palace. The other half of the team is in Arizona, a state that offers a remote mountain environment more conducive to astronomical observation than the light-polluted suburbs of Rome do. In the early nineties, at the Mt. Graham International Observatory, near Tucson, the Vatican installed a powerful four-million-dollar telescope and an astrophysics facility, together known as the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope, orvatt. Consolmagno, like many of his colleagues, shuttles frequently between Italy and Arizona, rarely spending more than a few months in one place.
Brother Guy, as he is widely known, never suggests that science might offer a means to prove the existence of God, or even to indicate a high probability of His existence. Consolmagno does not subscribe to what is known as the anthropic principle, which argues that the physical properties of the universe are so fine-tuned within the extraordinarily narrow range allowing for the emergence of intelligent life that the cosmos must have been made for us. Nor is he tempted by concordism—the idea that the discoveries of modern science can prove that events described in the Bible are grounded in reality. “Scripture was not written to tell you about the natural world,” Consolmagno told me. “It was to tell you about God.” The most egregious example of concordism, he said, was offered by Pope Pius XII, who had studied science and was interested in astronomy; in 1951, Pius XII gave a speech to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in which he characterized the big bang as confirming the Book of Genesis by “bearing witness to the august instant of the Fiat Lux, when, along with matter, there burst forth from nothing a sea of light and radiation.” Pius XII stopped suggesting that the big bang required the orchestration of God after he had a conference with Georges Lemaître, the Belgian scientist and Catholic priest who had laid the groundwork for the theory with his hypothesis that the universe had expanded from a “primeval atom.”
Consolmagno believes in the big bang, at least as a provisional explanation of the universe’s origins, and also in a creator God who exists before and beyond the big bang. In his understanding, the spheres of science and religion do not entirely overlap. Rather, they “live together—the one doesn’t replace the other,” he told me. “Using science to prove religion would make science greater than religion. It would make your version of God subservient to your understanding of the universe. And not only does that make for a pretty weak God, but it is also crazy, because in a thousand years’ time the scientific questions that people ask are going to be very different. Science goes obsolete—it doesn’t progress otherwise.
After getting his doctorate, at the University of Arizona, in Tucson, he went back East for postdoctoral work at Harvard and at M.I.T. By the time he was thirty, however, Consolmagno had failed to gain traction in his academic career, and, perhaps not coincidentally, had become disillusioned with the prospect of pursuing ever more esoteric science. “I’d be wondering, Why am I doing this?” he said recently. “Why am I beating myself up writing papers about the moons of Jupiter when there’s people starving in the world? Papers that only five people in the world are going to read, and two of them are my enemies?” He enrolled in the Peace Corps and went to Kenya, hoping to be sent to teach at a rural school. His academic credentials, however, led him to be assigned to one of the country’s premier high schools, in Nairobi, and then reassigned to a university there, training others to become science teachers. On weekends, he would travel to visit friends who had been assigned to remote schoolhouses, where he gave talks about astronomy. During these visits, he often set up a telescope so that locals could gaze in wonder at the moon.
For Consolmagno, abandoning secular life wasn’t the hard part. “I can’t relate to the things that most people are tempted to do,” he said. “Drinking? I’ve tried. It’s like drinking mouthwash. I dated for twenty years. I wasn’t happy.” He wasn’t tempted by gambling, and found that he had no hunger for worldly advancement. “It’s not to say I’m a saint,” he said. “It’s just that I can’t relate to people who do have real struggles with these things.” When Consolmagno told his parents of his intention, his mother, who was devout, was worried about the lifelong commitment. “And my dad’s answer was ‘I could have told you that in high school,’ ” Consolmagno told me. “He’s not the only one who told me that, including women I dated in high school.”
The idea that religion and science are inevitably at odds is widespread among secular observers. The Church, in its two millennia of existence, has played a role in this perception, by punishing people who dared to challenge its orthodoxies. In 1600, the cosmologist Giordano Bruno, who proposed that the universe was infinite and that stars were distant suns, was burned at the stake for his heresies. Galileo Galilei, who, in 1632, published a book supporting the Copernican theory that the Earth revolves around the sun, was accused of heresy, obliged to recant, and condemned to house arrest. It was not until 1992 that the Pope at the time, John Paul II, officially acknowledged that the seventeenth-century clerics who had prosecuted Galileo were wrong. (As for Bruno, the Church has conceded only that the killing was a “sad episode.”)
The idea that religion and science are inevitably at odds is widespread among secular observers. The Church, in its two millennia of existence, has played a role in this perception, by punishing people who dared to challenge its orthodoxies. In 1600, the cosmologist Giordano Bruno, who proposed that the universe was infinite and that stars were distant suns, was burned at the stake for his heresies. Galileo Galilei, who, in 1632, published a book supporting the Copernican theory that the Earth revolves around the sun, was accused of heresy, obliged to recant, and condemned to house arrest. It was not until 1992 that the Pope at the time, John Paul II, officially acknowledged that the seventeenth-century clerics who had prosecuted Galileo were wrong. (As for Bruno, the Church has conceded only that the killing was a “sad episode.”)
The secular world, meanwhile, has often attacked the Church as a peddler of absurd fantasies. In recent decades, writers grouped under the rubric the New Atheists—among them Christopher Hitchens, the swingeing author of “God Is Not Great,” and Richard Dawkins, who wrote the intemperate book “The God Delusion”—have decried organized religions for their damaging superstitions and mystifications, and have championed an explanatory rationalism in their stead. In “God Is Not Great,” Hitchens, who died in 2011, wrote, “If you will devote a little time to studying the staggering photographs taken by the Hubble telescope, you will be scrutinizing things that are far more awesome and mysterious and beautiful—and more chaotic and overwhelming and forbidding—than any creation or ‘end of days’ story.” The New Atheists were revisiting debates from the nineteenth century, when influential critics, among them Andrew Dickson White, the first president of Cornell University, sought to reëxamine established religions in the light of recent scientific discoveries. In “A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom,” published in 1896, White wrote that “dogmatic theology”—rigid interpretations of religious doctrine—inherently clashed with scientific findings, which were constantly evolving because of new thinking and technologies.
According to Consolmagno, the arguments put forward by the New Atheists and their ilk invoke what you might call a straw God. “When I say, ‘I believe in God,’ it means that I believe in one God, which means there are a whole lot of versions of God out there that I don’t believe in,” he told me. “An atheist, in order to be an atheist, has to have a really clear idea of who the God is they don’t believe in. More often than not, they are right—the God they don’t believe in I don’t believe in, either.” Consolmagno’s Catholic faith does not require that he believe the world was literally created in seven days, and he pities would-be astrophysicists who grew up in fundamentalist Christian traditions. Once, while visiting Oral Roberts University, in Tulsa, he stumbled across a way of expressing his perspective on the Book of Genesis: “I pointed out that the seven days of creation tell us not about creation but about God,” he recalled. “If you put that emphasis on it, I think you get closer to what the author of Genesis really wanted to do, which was to talk about God. What’s the goal of Genesis? It’s the seventh day, the Sabbath. And what’s the Sabbath? It’s when we start thinking about the universe, and the creator, rather than just worrying about feeding ourselves, and that’s what makes us people, rather than animals. God calls us to be astronomers. Not only is it clever—it might even be true.”
For Consolmagno, human accounts of occasions when the divine has made its presence felt—including reports of miracles—constitute data that he would be foolish to dismiss out of hand. “I’d be a pretty poor scientist if I rejected the evidence of so many experiences (including my own) that prayers are answered and that miracles do occur, just because they don’t fit my preconceived theory for the predictability of the universe,” he observed in “God’s Mechanics” (2008), in which he interviewed various other religious scientists and explored the basis for his own faith. Consolmagno wrote, “God is God; he can, in theory, do anything he likes. But, by seeing what it is he actually does and how he does it, I can begin to get an idea of what it is he likes to do and how he likes to do it. And I would have to say that the God who created this universe is someone who loves to act with elegance, economy, predictability, and consistency.”
According to Consolmagno, the arguments put forward by the New Atheists and their ilk invoke what you might call a straw God. “When I say, ‘I believe in God,’ it means that I believe in one God, which means there are a whole lot of versions of God out there that I don’t believe in,” he told me. “An atheist, in order to be an atheist, has to have a really clear idea of who the God is they don’t believe in. More often than not, they are right—the God they don’t believe in I don’t believe in, either.” Consolmagno’s Catholic faith does not require that he believe the world was literally created in seven days, and he pities would-be astrophysicists who grew up in fundamentalist Christian traditions. Once, while visiting Oral Roberts University, in Tulsa, he stumbled across a way of expressing his perspective on the Book of Genesis: “I pointed out that the seven days of creation tell us not about creation but about God,” he recalled. “If you put that emphasis on it, I think you get closer to what the author of Genesis really wanted to do, which was to talk about God. What’s the goal of Genesis? It’s the seventh day, the Sabbath. And what’s the Sabbath? It’s when we start thinking about the universe, and the creator, rather than just worrying about feeding ourselves, and that’s what makes us people, rather than animals. God calls us to be astronomers. Not only is it clever—it might even be true.
For Consolmagno, human accounts of occasions when the divine has made its presence felt—including reports of miracles—constitute data that he would be foolish to dismiss out of hand. “I’d be a pretty poor scientist if I rejected the evidence of so many experiences (including my own) that prayers are answered and that miracles do occur, just because they don’t fit my preconceived theory for the predictability of the universe,” he observed in “God’s Mechanics” (2008), in which he interviewed various other religious scientists and explored the basis for his own faith. Consolmagno wrote, “God is God; he can, in theory, do anything he likes. But, by seeing what it is he actually does and how he does it, I can begin to get an idea of what it is he likes to do and how he likes to do it. And I would have to say that the God who created this universe is someone who loves to act with elegance, economy, predictability, and consistency.”
Although Consolmagno enjoys talking about his thoughts on science and religion, he has generally refrained from discussing his views on politics. But the American government’s recent assault on research universities, and its dismantling of international health services—in the realm of astronomical sciences alone, the annual funding for grants from the National Science Foundation has been slashed by more than half—has prompted him to be more outspoken. “The uncertainty has already created chaos in my field, and certainly in the health field,” Consolmagno said. “It will be a while before it recovers just from this chaos, and that damage has already happened, and people will die because of it.” He went on to explain that President Trump is “doing damage not only to the science that I love but to conservative principles that I might want to embrace. He’s a terriblerepresentative of that. So it’s one thing to say, ‘I hate him because I’m a liberal,’ but I think it’s more important to say, ‘I despair of him in the places where I’m not a liberal.’ ”Copy link to cartoon
Link copied
Consolmagno, in his writings and in conversation, is reserved about giving testimonials of his personal experience of God. Perhaps the subject is too private, or the moments of conviction too fleeting. When we first met, in Castel Gandolfo, Consolmagno spoke of the awesome and sometimes destructive powers present in the physical universe, from tsunamis to earthquakes to supernovas. “Things that can cause pain are also things that have an innate beauty in them, and bending your brain around that is one of the great challenges of life,” he remarked. “Just like the pain of trying to understand physics—why does it have to be so hard? And yet there is a sublime beauty to how the universe works that we can only begin to touch. That, to me, is where I see the presence of God.” Does he see the presence of God when he looks through the Vatican’s telescopes? Yes, he said, but that’s only part of what he sees: “I see the presence of God—and I see the astronomy instructor who is explaining that thing to me, and I see my father telling me as a child, ‘That’s Jupiter,’ and I see the joy I felt as a three-year-old looking at the stars, or the joy as a ten-year-old watching the moon set, and seeing that it actually moves. All of those things, layered together.”
Looking at the moon suspended in the sky over the Tiber, I remembered what Consolmagno had told his audience in Glasgow: that he doubted his faith “only about two or three times a minute.” The line got a big laugh. “But the opposite of faith isn’t doubt,” he continued. “The opposite of faith is certainty. Being comfortable with doubt, just as I doubt my science, just as I am constantly questioning my science, I do that because it makes my science stronger, and I do that because it makes my faith stronger.” Consolmagno went on to describe a sense of transcendence he had once experienced while laboring over his meteorite measurements in his laboratory in Castel Gandolfo. “You take a lot of data, and you plot everything against everything else, to see if there’s a pattern,” he said. “And there was one moment where—oh, my God—the pattern was perfect. The density matched with the magnetic susceptibility on a perfect line, with one type all over here, and the second type over there. I had this feeling of God peering over my shoulder, going, ‘Isn’t that cool? Let me show you the next one.’ ” Nonbelievers might share this occasional sense of numinous exhilaration, even if their interpretations of the data diverge, Consolmagno acknowledged. He said, “Even scientists who don’t believe in God have to believe in ‘Oh, my God.’ ”
When the cardinals elected Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost to be the Pope, after slightly more than one rotation of the Earth, one of his first public acts was to make known his adoption of a new papal name: Leo XIV. The choice was inspired by Leo XIII, the late-nineteenth-century cleric who was outspoken in his support for working people and the poor—and who also happened to be the founder of the modern Vatican Observatory. In an e-mail the day after the conclave reached its decision, Consolmagno told me that he had never met the new Pope, but that everything he had heard about him was very encouraging. “It’s great fun to think of somebody who grew up in the Midwest not far from where I grew up, and as I understand it he even went to high school in Michigan,” Consolmagno wrote. “I think that means it will be very easy to talk with him, because there won’t be the barrier of language or culture; I think we will be able to understand each other.” After ten years as the Pope’s astronomer, Consolmagno would like to retire soon—the travel is getting to be a bit much—but his vow of obedience means he’ll stay at his post as long as he’s needed. He wrote, “As for my future plans, it’s entirely in his hands.” ♦
Guy Consolmagno, the head of the observatory, says of celestial revelations, “Even scientists who don’t believe in God have to believe in ‘Oh, my God.’ ”Photographs by Marta Giaccone for The New Yorker
