Our friend and frequent ENV contributor Jay Richards is awesomely gifted. He’s a bestselling author who writes brilliantly about science, economics, faith, politics, and literature. With a PhD from Princeton Theological Seminary, he’s a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute, plus as of lately an assistant research professor in the School of Business and Economics at Catholic University of America.
He’s also a super nice guy. And an Olympic athlete.
Okay, the part about being an Olympic athlete is not true — not yet — but the rest is.
Jay’s new book, with his equally formidable partner Jonathan Witt, likewise a Center for Science & Culture Senior Fellow, is The Hobbit Party: The Vision of Freedom that Tolkien Got and the West Forgot. Dr. Witt is also the author with Benjamin Wiker of A Meaningful World: How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature.
In their latest venture, Dr. Richards and Dr. Witt have emerged this week, on top of everything else, respectively as executive editor and managing editor of a very promising new online magazine, The Stream. This is one to bookmark immediately.
A partnership with James Robison, who co-authored Indivisible with Dr. Richards, The Stream represents their vision of — as a Catholic (Richards) and an Evangelical Christian (Robison) — a “highest common denominator ecumenism.” That is Jay’s neat phrase and it captures an idea that, I think, animates many of us at Discovery Institute. The Stream will cover politics, science, culture, faith, pretty much everything that matters, but through a particular lens. The editors explain:
Our most basic conviction is the Imago Dei, the idea that every human is made in the image of God with inherent dignity and value. The idea is visible in the Declaration of Independence where the American Founders insist “that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”
Of course the image of a human being that we carry around in our heads, whether a product of accident or purpose, goes to the heart of why the evolution debate, and the theory of intelligent design, deeply matter. So we’ll be following The Stream closely. There really is not another publication out there with this important focus, but broad enough to encompass so much. Their science coverage will, no doubt, be strong.
In this first week of publication, they’ve already published some very impressive news and commentary including Jay on “When to Doubt a Scientific Consensus,” Discovery Institute astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez explaining why you should “Be Skeptical of the Hype in the Search for ‘Earth-like’ Planets,” our own Casey Luskin on Charles Townes, “Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist Who Supported Intelligent Design in Cosmology,” just for starters.
Congratulations, Jay and Jonathan! More on this development coming up.