NEWS FEATURE: New Book Ponders God in the Cosmos

c. 2004 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Could it be, even scientists have wondered, that all of the cosmos was perfectly shaped to sustain life? Simply turning the pages of a new book, “Reflections on the Nature of God” (Templeton Foundation Press), plunges the reader deeper into this question. Editor Michael Reagan, founder of Lionheart Books […]

c. 2004 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Could it be, even scientists have wondered, that all of the cosmos was perfectly shaped to sustain life? Simply turning the pages of a new book, “Reflections on the Nature of God” (Templeton Foundation Press), plunges the reader deeper into this question.

Editor Michael Reagan, founder of Lionheart Books and former president of Turner Publishing, first crossed the threshold into the mystery when he examined new images generated from the Hubble telescope. They provoke “awe and wonder,” leaving him with the profound feeling that “we are not alone,” Reagan says in the book’s introduction.


He examined the question of God’s existence in an earlier book, “The Hand of God: Thoughts and Images Reflecting the Spirit of the Universe.”

In this new book, he goes a step further, featuring beautiful photographs of starry wonders such as the Keyhole Nebula, part of a much larger region known as the Carina Nebula and located some 8,000 light-years away from Earth.

Images from deep space still amaze him. “I sense the presence of God, but it is in the details that I find more comprehensible information about the nature of God,” Reagan says.

“How is it that this obscure planet on the edge of a galaxy in a universe of galaxies has such an amazing abundance of life? The diversity we see here on Earth is as astounding as the stars themselves.”

Hence, the book. With an introduction by noted religious historian Martin E. Marty, the new book invites readers to examine images from deep space and from Earth, and ask themselves: What is the nature of God?

The pictures alone make the book worth buying. There is the starkly lovely Sombrero Galaxy, so called because of its resemblance to a Mexican hat. Stars large and small twinkle around its pink and brownish-gray outline. Other photographs celebrate natural wonders from a close-up shot of a hermit crab in Bonaire to a picture of Hurricane Floyd just off the Florida coast in 1999.

Many of the pictures are beautiful. Some are exhilarating; others are provocative, even disturbing. They move, rumble, swirl and surprise with a commanding presence something like Yahweh in the Old Testament when he confounded the ancient Hebrews.


Juxtaposed alongside the images are quotations from voices as different as Nelson Mandela and Leonardo da Vinci. But then, such is the nature of reflecting on the nature of God.

Use the book as a guide to search for God, Marty suggests in his introduction. “While words and images cannot `prove’ the existence of God,” Marty writes, “they can evoke responses that resonate in the souls of seekers.” He explores how such concepts as detail, light, darkness, language and variety shape reflection on the nature of God.

Perhaps the reality of the search, in the context of faith, is best summarized in a quotation from John Burroughs. It is printed beneath the craggy image of the Red Spider Nebula, 3,000 light-years from Earth. “The forms and creeds of religion change,” says the quote, “but the sentiment of religion _ the wonder and reverence and love we feel in the presence of the inscrutable universe _ persist.”

KRE/PH END RNS

(Cecile S. Holmes, longtime religion writer, is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of South Carolina. Her e-mail address is: Cholmes(at)sc.edu)

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