Interfaith Easter: Michael Merrifield - An Astronomer's Easter (NS17)

Nomad Podcast

Tim Nash

Christianity, Faithshift, Deconstruction, Christianmysticism, Religion & Spirituality, Christianspirituality, Progressivechristian, Christian, Religion, Emergingchurch

4.7 • 658 Ratings

🗓️ 20 February 2015

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We took a bit of a chance with this one. We asked a secular scientist if they could find a link between their scientific discipline and the themes of Easter. Prof. Michael Merrifield had a crack at it, and found some sweet connections between his field of astronomy and death and resurrection (and also talked a lot about his real passion, telescopes!).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Nomad Spirituality
0:16.2	So here we are again.
0:18.0	This is our Interfaith Easter series.
0:21.7	Yeah.
0:23.2	Been going right so far, I think.
0:24.7	I think it has.
0:25.5	Who have we got today?
0:26.8	Well, I've taken a bit of a gamble with this one.
0:29.3	Because I had this kind of vague memory of someone once talking about stars
0:33.2	and how they kind of die and are reborn and all that kind of stuff.
0:36.8	And I thought, ooh, Easter, death and resurrection.
0:39.0	Let's see if we can find an astronomer to talk about that kind of stuff.
0:43.1	So I found a guy called Professor Michael Merrifield.
0:46.9	He is a professor of astronomy.
0:49.6	He researches the structure of galaxies and tries to reconstruct how they form.
0:54.5	Wow.
0:55.0	Sounds interesting, don't it?
0:56.1	But I say it's a gamble in a sense that he's a professor.
0:59.3	He's not a Christian.
1:00.6	So I've basically contacted him and said,
1:02.1	can you do a Lent slash Easter reflection for us based around galaxies?
1:06.6	How did he respond?
	...

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