What a Phenomenon! In Memory of Teilhard de Chardin

In 1962, I purchased and carefully read The Phenomenon of Man, the magnum opus of French paleontologist and Jesuit theologian Teilhard de Chardin, who was born 145 years ago on May 1.* Teilhard died on Easter Sunday in April 1955, the month before I graduated from high school. It was not until ’62, though, that I heard of, and was challenged by, him for the first time. 

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was his full legal name when he was born in 1881. “Teilhard” was the core family surname and “de Chardin” was the inherited second surname from his mother’s noble line. The double surname originated in 1841, when Pierre‑Cirice Teilhard (his grandfather) married Victoire Barron de Chardin.

Although ordained as a Jesuit priest, Teilhard became a paleontologist (a scientist who studies past life as known from fossil remains). His research, coupled with his belief in the Creator God, led him to an evolutionary worldview that culminates at the “Omega Point,” the grand fulfillment of creation.

Here is an introduction to three contemporary scholars who were significantly influenced by Teilhard.

Brian Swimme (b. 1950) is an American mathematical and evolutionary cosmologist who teaches at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. He grew up in a Catholic tradition, which clearly impressed him, and as one reviewer says, there a strong "incense scent of religiosity" to his work. But he does not publicly claim to be a Christian now.

Interestingly, though, Swimme has adopted Teilhard’s thinking that everything in existence has both a physical and a spiritual dimension, and he believes the universe is evolving with a telos (goal or purpose) of beauty. Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation has promoted his ideas, along with other Teilhard scholars who are clearly Christians.

Journey of the Universe (2011) was co-written by Swimme, and he is the personable narrator of that beautifully done film, which clearly show his affinity with Teilhard. It portrays well the sense of evolution as a sacred, universe‑wide process moving toward greater complexity and consciousness (which is what Swimme terms beauty).

Watching Swimme’s movie filled me with a sense of the Creator's awesomeness and the universe's splendor. I highly recommend the film, which is currently available on various streaming platforms.

Simon Conway Morris (b. 1951), a groundbreaking paleontologist at the University of Cambridge, was awarded the 2026 Templeton Prize last week (on April 21). It is valued at over $1.4 million and one of the world’s largest individual awards.**

According to Religion News Service, when he was about seven, Simon’s mother “gave him an album of stamps depicting various pre-historic animals and dinosaurs. This prompted him to go fossil-hunting and inspired a lifelong fascination with the evolution of life.”

Morris has spoken publicly about coming to Christian faith and rejecting materialism. He candidly states that he is “convinced of the truth of the Gospels.” Looking at how the universe has evolved, Taylor says he believes “God is the agent of creation” and is “happy to be known as a Christian.”

Ilia Delio is a Franciscan Sister and American theologian specializing in the intersection of science and religion. She has been associated with Rohr’s Center since 2013, and he explicitly identifies her as an expert on Teilhard. She is said to have “a widely appreciated gift for making Teilhard’s brilliant but dense writings accessible.”

Delio’s Christ in Evolution (2008) is the book most scholars point to as her most sustained and direct engagement with Teilhard. In it, she works through his positing of Christ as the future fullness of the whole evolutionary process, the Omega Point, where the individual and collective adventure of humanity finds its fulfillment.

That book established Delio’s reputation as Teilhard’s premier contemporary interpreter and led to her being called “the most prolific Teilhard interpreter in the English-speaking world today.”

I close with words widely attributed to Teilhard: “Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient to reach the end,” but “it might take a very long time.”

Note: I am grateful to my friend Claude (Anthropic’s AI) for research assistance in the preparation of this article.]

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  * Teilhard’s book was first published under the title Le Phénomene Humain in 1955, and the first English translation was issued in 1959. The title of a new translation, published in 1999, is The Human Phenomenon (the title that the first English translation should have had).

** The award was established in 1972 by John Templeton (1912~2008), a Presbyterian Christian from Tennessee who became a global investor and philanthropist.

Happy 75th Birthday, Ken Sehested!

Through the years, I have posted articles regarding many individuals, but very few about personal friends / acquaintances. This post is about a man I first met 39 years ago and whom I am glad to call a friend. I trust you will enjoy learning more about him and his meritorious activities over the past decades. 

Kenneth L. Sehested was born on April 29, 1951. After receiving degrees from New York University in 1973 and Union Theological Seminary in 1978, Ken began his career with Seeds magazine in the latter year. That publication, which I remember well, focused on food security and world hunger concerns. That is probably when I saw Ken’s name for the first time.

In 1984, Ken became the founding director of the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America (BPFNA), and as one who had become a pacifist while still a teenager, I became even more impressed with Ken and his work. I don’t remember how soon it was that I became a supporter of BPFNA, but I attended their summer gathering in Mars Hill, N.C., in July 1987.**

Perhaps it was later that year that Ken published “Trust and Obey,” which was identified as Peacemakers International Spiritual Pamphlet #10. I noted in my January 1988 diary/journal that I had read it. In that small publication, he quoted Clarence Jordan (1912~69), whom many of us greatly admired back then and still hold in great esteem.

Jordan said, “Faith is not belief in spite of the evidence; that’s not faith, but foolishness. Faith is life lived in scorn of the consequences.” Then Ken asserted that trust and obedience most go together: “To obey is the evidence that we live in trust.” Then he states,

Trusting and obeying creates no interest off which we may live. If unemployed, we fail to exercise our faith, we are reduced to spiritual poverty.

Edwin Dahlberg (1893~1986) was an American Baptist pastor and a passionate peacemaker. In 1960, the Gandhi Peace Award was established, and two peacemakers were selected to receive the awards that inaugural year: Dahlberg and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Four years later, the American Baptist Churches established the Dahlberg Peace Award, and the first recipient was Martin Luther King, Jr.  In 1979, Jimmy Carter received that Award, and Ken Sehested was the recipient in 1995. I was overjoyed when I heard that my friend Ken had been given such a prestigious award.

Ken and Nancy Hastings married in 1973, and they both attended Union Theological Seminary, graduating in the same class of 1978. After years of service in various ministry activities as members of Oakhurst Baptist Church in Decatur, a suburban city on the east side of Atlanta, in 2001, Ken & Nancy (and others) established the Circle of Mercy (CoM) church in Asheville, N.C.

Ken relinquished his pastoral duties at CoM in 2015, but Nancy continued her ministry there until 2021. They are still a part of that unique church fellowship. In 2014, Ken created an online blog, prayerandpolitiks.org. Its motto is “at the intersection of spiritual formation and prophetic action.”  (Here is a link to “Contagious Resurrection,” his recent post: Recent – Prayer & Politiks.)

When I asked for some of his quotes that I might share here, he wrote, “Probably the bedrock statement of my theological orientation has long been this: God is more taken with the agony of the earth than the ecstasy of heaven.” Also, “There’s no getting right with God. There’s only getting soaked. (A protest against transactional notions of faith.)”

Ken also shared this core belief/emphasis: “Faith entails both the disarming of the heart and the disarming of the nations. (One of the believing community’s worst failures is not understanding the interconnection of those two realities.)”

It has been my privilege to share these reflections about my friend Ken Sehested. Perhaps those of you who do know him and have read some of his publications learned something new from this post. I am especially happy that those of you who haven’t heard about him have learned some important things about him now, just a few days before his 75^th birthday.

I now close this post with what Ken calls his “favorite homegrown benediction.” 

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** In August 2018, I wrote an article titled "Passionately Pursuing Peace.” It was published that month in Word&Way, the historic Baptist paper of Missouri. The piece narrates some of the history of Baptist peace publications before the BPFNA was founded. (That article can be found on my supplementary blogsite, see here).

What is Truth?

A week ago today, most Christians around the world observed what is widely called Good Friday. It was on that day that Pilate said to Jesus, probably scoffingly, “What is truth?” (John 18:38).  He may not have meant the question seriously; yet that remains an inquiry of profound importance that deserves deep reflection.

Philosophers have discussed the meaning of truth for millennia. In the Western world, that question dates back at least to the sixth century BCE, and even further back in the Eastern world of India and China. In the philosophical formulation of responses to the question, the following are the most common.

** Correspondence theory — truth is what matches reality. For example, “it is raining” is true if, in fact, one can clearly see or feel raindrops falling.

** Coherence theory — truth is what fits consistently within a web of established beliefs, like interlocking puzzle pieces with no gaps.

**Pragmatist theory — truth is what works in practice, proving useful and yielding real-world results.

These three theories are all correct and useful in answering the question regarding what truth is on the second of the three levels of reality about which I wrote in my February 28 blog post (see here). But they are not sufficient for comprehending “ultimate truth,” which is what I called the third/top level of reality in that article.

Ultimate Truth must be known by personal encounter rather than by abstract thought. Emil Brunner (1889~1966) wrote Truth as Encounter, and that is a primary emphasis of some of the philosophers I have studied most. Brunner rejected classical mysticism, but I am using that term here to refer to personal contact with God rather than intellectual reasoning about God.

Here, briefly, are three philosophers/theologians who emphasize mysticism the way I am defining it:

** Blaise Pascal (1623~62). On November 23, 1654, that highly acclaimed French mathematician and physicist wrote about his unexpected, life-changing experience: “FIRE. GOD of Abraham, GOD of Isaac, GOD of Jacob not of the philosophers and of the learned. Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.” That was surely a “mystical” encounter of the highest level.

** Søren Kierkegaard (1813~55). That famous Danish philosopher, widely regarded as the father of existentialism, deepened Pascal’s vision by insisting that God’s existence cannot be proved by reason but rather must be personally encountered as the living God in whom one is brought to faith, repentance, and worship. His emphasis on the “leap of faith” is easily linked to “mysticism.”

** Richard Rohr (b. 1943). This noted Franciscan friar and Roman Catholic priest authored The Universal Christ (2019), one of the most valuable books I have read in the last ten years. He embraces the mystical label himself, and his emphasis on contemplative, non-dualistic knowing fits comfortably within the broader mystical tradition.

** Michael Polanyi (1891~1976). This scientist turned philosopher is not a religious thinker as the previous three are, but he can be thought of as an epistemological ally rather than a fellow mystic. He demolishes the pretension that objective, impersonal, propositional knowing is the only legitimate form of knowledge, so he is a philosophical apologist for knowing truth by encounter.

Knowing Ultimate Truth is far more complex than understanding truth on lower levels. In everyday life, “truth” can be considered whatever works pragmatically (as in the third theory listed above). In that sense, truth can be “relative.” What works for me may not be the same as what works for you—and that is all right.

In considering both what is real and what is truth, though, we must seek both in the higher/universal realm. And we need to remember Jesus saying that “you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32).

In John’s Gospel, Jesus does not present truth as a set of detached propositions but as a relationship that unfolds in ongoing encounter. Those who “abide” in his word “know the truth,” not in the sense of embracing correct ideas, but by entering into living fellowship with the One who declared, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6a).  

The freedom Jesus promises is the freedom that comes when Ultimate Reality—whom Christians confess as God—is no longer an object of discussion but a personal Presence who addresses us, claims us, and sets us free.

With relation to the contemporary world, on every level, people of this country and around the world need to be freed from the lies of the current POTUS, who, for more than a decade now, has been misleading the public with lies and deceptive statements daily.