What Priorities have Gained?

In the face of the economic conditions, many Americans have become more focused on surviving and thriving. When asked to identify their highest priority in life, more Americans mention issues of health, leisure, personal comfort, and lifestyle balance than did so just a few years ago. Cumulatively, these priorities have grown from just 13% in 2006 to 20% in the 2010 study.

In fact it seems to me that he presents the Athenians in a rather positive light. They are portrayed as behaving in fairly seriously, you'll notice. When the group of Stoics and Epicureans that Paul had been disputing with in the market took him from there to a Council meeting of the Areopagus, they tell him that they want to know about his strange ideas and particularly about what they might mean.

In a sense, if I am right about their meaning, these ancient pagans had a clearer understanding of a sacredness of the feminine than modern theologians who want to convert the Church into a religion with a Divine Feminine. Their idea even carries a little bit of the ministry of the Church in its role of administering, as well as proclaiming, salvation. Christians do not worship a goddess, and I have commented on that rather extensively in "Revelation and Imagination."

That is Charles Coulston Gillespie's "Genesis and Geology", an early book from the historian of science whose work on the development of objectivity as a cardinal principle of modern science is widely appreciated. Gillespie describes the impact of geology, as it developed in the 19th century, on religious belief before Darwin.