Blogging The Origin

by tristero

I’m in Oswego, NY for rehearsals leading up to the premiere of my new evening-long piece, The Origin which will take place on February 6 and 7 at 7:30 PM at Waterman Theatre, Tyler Hall on the SUNY Oswego campus. I’ll be blogging about the experience all week and try to post some pictures and audio files (oddly, the last time I tried, it was all but impossible to post audio files to Blogger, so I may have to post links). If you’re in the area, please come and say hello! I’ll be there for both performances and there should be Q&A’s after each.

Since rehearsals begin in less than two hours and I have much to do before then, I”ll make this post short and leave you with a link to an NPR interview with Keith Thompson about the young Charles Darwin. It’s quite good, but in an inexcusable nod to religious correctness, Leann Hanson says:

Today, scientists continue to uncover the mechanisms of [Darwin’s] insight and theologians continue to question it.

The implied parallelism is sheer nonsense. True, scientists do continue to uncover the mechanisms of evolution, informed and influenced by Darwin’s theory of natural selection. However, only some theologians continue to question it and most of those are from extreme right American evangelical churches or radical islamists. The rest of the worldwide theological community, Christian and otherwise, has either little to say about Darwin’s theories – they’re not relevant to their beliefs – or sees no conflict whatsoever between their religion and science. To frame it the way Hanson does is to manufacture a worldwide controversy that doesn’t exist as well as elevate the status of a small, well-financed group of rightwing operatives to that of spokesmen for Christianity. Hopefully, somewhere in the series that NPR is planning this month they will deal with the social issues swirling around the teaching of evolution in this country in a responsible fashion.