Posted October 7, 2015 Book: Making All Things New: Catholicity, Cosmology, Consciousness Author: Illia Delio Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY. 2015. Pp. 218 An Excerpt from the Introduction: This is a book about catholicity. I hope you will not put it down too quickly if you are note Catholics, because it is not exactly about the Catholic Church but about catholicity or awareness of how sun, moon, stars, Kepler, Saturn, maple trees, muddy rivers, amoeba, bacteria, and all peoples of the earth form a whole. Catholicity is from a Greek word, katholikos, which means "of the whole" or "a sense of wholeness." It is the orientation of all lfie toward making wholes and thus toward universality or turning together as one. So, by way of introduction, this book is about wholeness and wholemaking that emergies from the nexus of catholicity, cosmology, and consciousness. The early Greeks coined the word catholic to describe attunement to the physical order, so that catholicity meant living in harmony with the stars. To live in catholicity was to have a sense of the cosmos or the whole order of things, including physical and spiritual things. An Excerpt from the Book: There is an urgency today to reconnect cosmology and catholicity, not as abstract concepts, but as the reconciliation of modern science and religion. The Catholic Church, with its core incarnational foundation, can play a major role in this renewal. "Science develops best," Saint John Paul II wrote, "when it concepts and conclusions can be integrated into the wider human culture and its concerns for ultimate meaning and value." Religion, too, develops best when its doctrines are not abstract and fixed in an ancient past but integrated into the wider stream of life. Albert Einstein once said that "science without religion is lame and religion without science is blind." So too, John Paul II wrote, "Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish. Teilhard de Chardin saw that dialogue alone between the disciplines is insufficient; what we need is a new synthesis of science and religion, drawing insights from each discipline into a new unity. Table of Contents: 1. Catholicity and Cosmos 2. The Human Dumpty Earth 3. Big Bang Catholicity 4. Quantum Consciousness 5. Jesus and Creative Wholeness 6. Evolution and the Four Last Things 7. The Church as an Open System 8. Putting on the Mind of Christ 9. Conscious Catholicity