Nicholls (2025), Jeffrey, Cognitive Cosmogenesis: A systematic integration of Physics and Theology, Austin Macauley 2025 ' More than 60 years ago my spiritual advisors (rightly or wrongly) diagnosed in me a divine call to the Roman Catholic priesthood. As soon as I turned 18 I entered the Dominican Order
I quickly fell on love with their leading theologian, Thomas Aquinas (1225 - 1275) and read him voraciously. His Latin is so easy and his ideas quite cosmic.
Aquinas revolutionized theology by harmonizing it with the work of Aristotle, the best science available in the Middle Ages. Since the time of Galileo (1562 - 1642) modern science has travelled far beyond Aristotle. We now have comprehensive knowledge of the Universe. We can now see that it is big enough and beautiful enough to be considered divine. It seems obvious to me that it is time to introduce science to theology once again. Just three steps are required:
First, we must assume that the Universe is divine. This makes God observable, amenable to modern science which is based on observation.
Second, it follows, if this is the case, that physics and theology have the same subject and must therefore be consistent.
Third we need open up a new field of research, repeating Aristotle’s ancient journey from physics to theology. In this book I have tried to trace a quantum theoretical path from the unstoppable omnipotent emptiness of the initial singularity to the exquisite complexity of our world. My only guide is the logical constraint placed on omnipotence by consistency.'  
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Alexander Howard (2025_03_27), The Glass Menagerie: the haunting beauty of Tennessee Wiliams’ play endures in this Sydney revival, ' Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) is widely regarded as one of America’s greatest playwrights. A prolific and unabashedly autobiographical writer, Williams’ career spanned four decades of the 20th century. The Glass Menagerie, which premiered in Chicago on December 26 1944, was the writer’s first major success. It won scores of national theatrical awards and catapulted Williams to enduring fame. An engrossing new production of the classic play, currently running at Sydney’s Ensemble Theatre, does more than simply revive the famous piece of theatre. It revitalises it for modern audiences. [. . .] As Liesel Badorrek, director of the new production at Sydney’s Ensemble Theatre, points out, “Williams wanted to break with the prosaic realism that he felt had dominated the American theatre” and fashion a new, more symbolic approach to theatre, where memory and emotion take precedence over conventional forms of dramatic action. According to Williams himself, his aim was to demonstrate that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance. To bring his vision to life, Williams combined heightened poetic dialogue, repeated musical motifs and unconventional stagecraft. In doing so, he intentionally blurred the lines between reality and memory, allowing the audience to experience the emotional truth of the characters, rather than a literal depiction of events. This innovative approach to dramatic form was revolutionary at the time and became a hallmark of Williams’ mature work. As Arthur Miller once wrote: The Glass Menagerie in one stroke lifted lyricism to its highest level in our theatre’s history, but it broke new ground in another way. What was new in Tennessee Williams was his rhapsodic insistence that form serve his utterance rather than dominating and cramping it.' back

Anthony Faiola (2022_03_22), Autocrats roll back rights and rule of law — and cite Trump’s example, ' Under Hungary’s antigay “propaganda” law, bookstores were fined for selling LGBTQ+ themed tomes without sealed plastic wrappers and a museum director was fired for allowing minors into an exhibit with images of same-sex couples. But the autocratic government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban stopped short of targeting the community’s premier event: the annual Pride parade. Get concise answers to your questions. Try Ask The Post AI. Until now. Parliament voted overwhelmingly this month to ban the event — and threatened to use facial recognition technology to identify violators. What changed? According to Orban, it was the return to the White House of President Donald Trump. Gergely Gulyas, Orban’s chief of staff, told journalists that the change in administrations in Washington had lifted the “American boot” off the chest of the Hungarian government, making it easier “to breathe.” [. . .] Democratic backsliding in Eastern Europe, the Balkans and Turkey long predates Trump; the president has been said to have derived some of his messaging from Orban. But in several nations, including Hungary and Serbia, authorities say openly that Trump’s return has helped them serve up what critics say are fresh violations of basic rights. In Turkey, where President Recep Tayyip Erdogan this week detained his leading political rival and dozens of others, advocates see Trump’s influence as an enabling factor. The new Trump administration “is bringing together autocrats and would-be autocrats around the world,” said Rosa Balfour, director of Carnegie Europe. “What they share is a radical right agenda, and they are much more connected in their policies and goals than we have been assuming".' back

Casey Quackenbush (2023_03_25), The Ukrainian teens who took on Putin's gulag archipelago — and won , ' Ukraine says that almost 20,000 Ukrainian children from the ages of 7 to 18 have been illegally taken from their homes in occupied territory. Russia, which has defended its actions as a humanitarian effort rescuing children from a Nazi-ridden Ukraine, has boasted of “accepting” more than 700,000 children. But those numbers include whole families and are not specific to child deportation, and the exact number of missing Ukrainian children remains unknown. Since the beginning of the conflict, at least 1,243 have returned. These sorts of camps date back to the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, who used them to indoctrinate or “Russify” Soviet children of other ethnicities. Today, in an effort to wipe Ukrainian children of their nationality, President Vladimir Putin has redeployed some of the same infrastructure to offer what the Russian government describes as a patriotic education. The effort has drawn international condemnation. In 2023, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Putin and his commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, for forcibly deporting children, which is a war crime. In December, a new report from the Yale School of Public Health upped the ante: It found Putin and Kremlin officials guilty of leading a program of systematic coerced adoption, fostering and naturalization of Ukrainian children, which may constitute a crime against humanity. “These camps, now and then, were about severing family unity and national identity that conflicted with the then Soviet state,” said Nathaniel Raymond, a human rights investigator who led the report. “And now, Putin’s Russia".' back

Colin Flint (2025_03_26), Maritime truce would end a sorry war on the waves for Russia that set back its naval power ambitions, ' Away from the grueling land battles and devastating airstrikes, the Ukraine war has from its outset had a naval element. Soon after the February 2022 invasion, Russia imposed a de facto naval blockade on Ukraine, only to see its fleet stunningly defeated during a contest for control of the Black Sea. But that war on the waves looks like it could be ending. Under the terms of a deal announced on March 25, 2025, by the U.S. and agreed upon in Saudi Arabia, both sides of the conflict committed to ensuring “safe navigation, eliminate the use of force, and prevent the use of commercial vessels for military purposes in the Black Sea,” according to a White House statement. The naval aspect of the Ukraine war has gotten less attention than events on land and in the skies. But it is, I believe, a vital aspect with potentially far-reaching consequences. [. . .] Thinkers such as the British geopolitician Sir Halford Mackinder or the U.S. theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan characterized maritime powers as countries that possessed traits of democratic liberalism and free trade. In contrast, land powers were often portrayed as despotic and militaristic. While such generalizations have historically been used to demonize enemies, there is still a contrived tendency to divide the world into land and sea powers. An accompanying view that naval and army warfare is somewhat separate has continued. And this division gives us a false impression of Russia’s progress in the war with Ukraine. While Moscow has certainly seen some successes on land and in the air, that should not draw attention away from Russia’s stunning defeat in the Black Sea that has seen Russia have to retreat from the Ukrainian shoreline and keep its ships far away from the battlefront. [. . .] Alongside being thwarted in its ability to disrupt Ukrainian exports, Russia has also come under direct naval attack from Ukraine. Since February 2022, using unmanned attack drones, Ukraine has successfully sunk or damaged Russian ships and whittled away at Russia’s Black sea fleet, sinking about 15 of its prewar fleet of about 36 warships and damaging many others.' back

David E. Sanger (2025_03_22), How Elon Musk’s DOGE Cuts Leave a Vacuum That China Can Fill, ' When President Trump announced on Friday that the United States would move ahead with a long-debated project to build a stealthy next-generation fighter jet, the message to China was clear: The United States plans to spend tens of billions of dollars over the next decade, probably far longer, to contain Beijing’s ability to dominate the skies over the Pacific. But here on earth, the reality has been very different. As the Department of Government Efficiency roars through agencies across government, its targets have included some of the organizations that Beijing worried about most, or actively sought to subvert. And, as with much that Elon Musk’s DOGE has dismembered, there has been no published study of the costs and benefits of losing those capabilities — and no discussion of how the roles, arguably as important as a manned fighter, might be replaced. [. . .] Over at the Department of Homeland Security, a series of cyberdefenses have been stripped away, at a moment when China’s state-backed hackers have been more successful than at any time in recent memory. [. . .] All this has the Chinese celebrating. As the Voice of America was being dismantled and fell silent, The Global Times, a mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, wrote that “the so-called beacon of freedom, VOA, has now been discarded by its own government like a dirty rag.” back

E. J Dionne Jr (2025_03_17), Washington’s new archbishop is progressive, outspoken — and ready to stand up, ' If Cardinal Robert McElroy had decided long ago to prepare himself for engaging with presidents, public policy and a deeply divided Washington, he might have lived his life exactly as he has. It goes all the way back to his time as a Harvard undergraduate, when he wrote a thesis exploring how President John F. Kennedy handled the Cuban missile crisis while avoiding nuclear war. Later, he earned a PhD in political science from Stanford. Since then, he has been one of the Catholic Church’s most consistent fighters for social justice, the rights of immigrants and climate action. [. . . ] On the other hand, there can be no denying that in the closing chapter of his tenure, Pope Francis knew he was delivering an unmistakable message by sending McElroy to lead Catholics in the nation’s capital. It’s a message that matters within the church but also far beyond it. Just last month, after all, Francis sent a letter to American bishops lamenting the “major crisis that is taking place in the United States with the initiation of a program of mass deportations.” He warned that a policy “built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly.” [. . .] In an interview and follow-up email exchange in late February, he did not shrink from the battles that lie ahead. “It has become clear to me in the past days that one of the pastoral issues that I will have to face in leading the archdiocese is the concrete suffering that will flow from the cuts in governmental service which are taking place in our country,” he said. “The first level of this is the suffering being endured by our parishioners who have lost their jobs, and the often traumatic ways in which they have lost them. So many of these men and women are people of great talents who have dedicated their lives to public service, only to find that service abruptly ended, often without a clear rationale being presented.” [. . .] But the political scientist is resolute in saying that although politics matters, it will not be at the center of his ministry. For starters, he faces some practical problems, including an archdiocese grappling with a large annual deficit and declining contributions from the faithful. Nor is McElroy in doubt about his top concern: “The drift of young people from the life of the church is, in my view, the overwhelming pastoral problem we face — and the first, second and third priority".' back

J. Michael Luttig (2025_03_23), It’s Trump vs. the Courts, and It Won’t End Well for Trump, ' President Trump has wasted no time in his second term in declaring war on the nation’s federal judiciary, the country’s legal profession and the rule of law. He has provoked a constitutional crisis with his stunning frontal assault on the third branch of government and the American system of justice. The casualty could well be the constitutional democracy Americans fought for in the Revolutionary War against the British monarchy 250 years ago. Mr. Trump has yearned for this war against the federal judiciary and the rule of law since his first term in office. He promised to exact retribution against America’s justice system for what he has long mistakenly believed is the federal government’s partisan “weaponization” against him.[. . .] But unless Mr. Trump immediately turns an about-face and beats a fast retreat, not only will he plunge the nation deeper into constitutional crisis, which he appears fully willing to do, he will also find himself increasingly hobbled even before his already vanishing political honeymoon is over. [. . .] All that is left to check his impulses is the nation’s independent judiciary, which Alexander Hamilton deemed “essential” to our country’s constitutional governance. A country without an independent judiciary is not one in which any of us should want to live, except perhaps Mr. Trump while he resides in the White House. [. . .] On Tuesday, Mr. Trump called for the impeachment of Judge James E. Boasberg, the chief judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, after the judge ordered a pause on the deportation to El Salvador of more than 200 Venezuelan migrants said to be gang members. For good measure, Mr. Trump called the judge a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator.” [. . .] Within hours, the tectonic plates of the constitutional order shifted beneath Mr. Trump’s feet. The chief justice of the United States, John G. Roberts Jr. — the head of the third branch of government — rebuked the president in a rare missive. “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” the chief justice instructed. [. . .] Mr. Trump seems supremely confident, though deludedly so, that he can win this war against the federal judiciary, just as he was deludedly confident that he could win the war he instigated against America’s democracy after the 2020 election. [. . .] As Thomas Paine wrote in “Common Sense” in 1776, “in America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other".' back

Kenneth Chang (2025_03_26_, Abel Prize Awarded to Japanese Mathematician Who Abstracted Abstractions, ' Masaki Kashiwara, a Japanese mathematician, received this year’s Abel Prize, which aspires to be the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in math. Dr. Kashiwara’s highly abstract work combined algebra, geometry and differential equations in surprising ways. The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, which manages the Abel Prize, announced the honor on Wednesday morning. “First of all, he has solved some open conjectures — hard problems that have been around,” said Helge Holden, chairman of the prize committee. “And second, he has opened new avenues, connecting areas that were not known to be connected before. This is something that always surprises mathematicians.” Mathematicians use connections between different areas of math to tackle recalcitrant problems, allowing them to recast those problems into concepts they better understand. [. . .] Dr Kashiwara’s work is more like tying together several abstract ideas of mathematics into more abstract combinations that are insightful to mathematicians tackling a variety of problems. “I think it’s not easy,” Dr. Kashiwara said. “I’m sorry.” Dr. Holden pointed to one particular work, in which Dr. Kashiwara deduced the existence of crystal bases, as a “masterpiece of a theorem,” with 14 steps of induction, using inference to recursively prove a series of assertions. “He has to solve one by solving the others, and they’re all connected,” Dr. Holden said. “And if one falls, the whole thing falls. So he is able to combine them in a very deep and very clever way.” But Dr. Holden said he could not provide a simple explanation of the proof. “That’s hard,” he said. “I can see the 14 steps.” back

Ki-Weon Seo et al (2025_03_28), Abrupt sea level rise and Earth's gradual pole shift reveal permanent hydrological regime changes in the 21st century, Rising atmospheric and ocean temperatures have caused substantial changes in water circulation and land surface water fluxes such as precipitartion and evapotranspiration, potentially leding to abrupt shifts in terrestrial wter storage. The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) reanalysis v5 (ERA5) soil moisture (SM) priduct reveals a sharp depletion during the early 21st century, During the period 2000 to 2002,soil moinsture declined by approximately 1614 gigatonnes, much lrger than greenand's ice loss pf about 900 gigatonnes (2002-2006). SM depletion continued with an additional 1009 gigatonne loss. This depletion is supportred by two independent observations of global men sea level rise (~4.4 millimetres) and the Earth's pole shift (~45 centimetres). Precipitation deficits and stab;e evepotranspiration likelu casued this decline, and SM has not recovered as of 2021, with future rovery unlikely under present climate conditions.' back

Luis Samaniego (2025_03_28), Permanent shifts in the global water cycle, ' Understanding the relationship between atmospheric carbon levels and global temperature dates back to 1895, when Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius argued that variations in carbon dioxide concentrations could affect Earth’s heat budget. How climate warming affects Earth’s hydrological cycle—the continuous water movement between Earth and the atmosphere—is a key question for managing water resources and making weather predictions. Although local and regional changes in the water cycle have been observed , conclusive proof of a global-scale shift has been elusive. Answering this question requires decades of global mean sea level data and advanced climate and hydrological modeling. On page 1408 of this issue, Seo et al. report how the integration of multiple global geophysical datasets reveals a permanent decline in terrestrial water storage. The study provides robust evidence of an irreversible shift in terrestrial water sources under the present changes in climate.' back

Manuel Roig-Franzia & Herb Scribner (2025_03_28), How the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg made noise with a Signal scoop, In his article, Goldberg laid out how he’d been inadvertently invited to join the Signal group by national security adviser Michael Waltz, where plans for the attack were being discussed. At first, he explained in his article, he thought the invitation was a hoax. But he became convinced that it was the real thing when the attack took place just as it had been discussed in the Signal group. He watched the discussion in real-time as the attack was happening on a Saturday afternoon, Washington time, while he was sitting in his car at a grocery store. (Because no detail about Goldberg’s reporting now seems too small, people have asked which grocery store, he said. It was the Safeway on Connecticut Avenue NW, near Chevy Chase.) Goldberg’s article was about how government officials had been recklessly talking about sensitive matters on Signal rather than via secure government channels. In writing his piece, Goldberg held back much of the text thread, and did not reveal some details and specific wording related to the types of military equipment involved and the times they would be deployed. That might have been it. A scoop for the ages, and another win for the Atlantic, which in recent years has piled up journalism awards, including its first Pulitzers, lured top talent from competing publications and become an essential read for both Beltway insiders and the general public.But within hours of the story’s publication (headline: “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans”) the White House started diminishing and rebutting Goldberg. Hegseth complained Monday to reporters that “nobody was texting war plans.” The next day, Tulsi Gabbard — Trump’s director of national intelligence — testified in a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing that she didn’t recall specific weapons being mentioned. By Wednesday morning, Goldberg had had enough. He decided it was in the public interest to prove them wrong. He published the entire text chain. (He did, however, hold out the name of a CIA officer at the agency’s request.)' back