Hello and welcome to Speaking with Joy, a podcast about books, beauty, and music.

So make yourself a cup of tea, sit down, and let's begin.

The heavens declare the glory of God.

The skies proclaim the work of his hands.

Day after day they pour forth speech.

Night after night they reveal knowledge.

They have no speech. They use no words, no sound is heard from them, yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the

ends of the world. Perhaps one of the most human experiences is to stand under a night sky and marvel at the twinkling diamonds that are the

galaxies spread out before us. One of my favorite things about going back to Colorado, where I'm from,

is that there's very little light pollution when you get up into the mountains. So I love to drive up

the country roads near where I used to live at the edge of the national forest, and get out and lay

on my back in the middle of a field and gaze at the stars. With no light pollution, the sky looks

positively dusted with stars. We all seem to crave that feeling that gazing at the heavens gives

us, a feeling both incredibly small, but also embedded in this beauty

that stretches out over us every single day, even though we can't see it in the sunlight.

Last week, we talked with Dr. Michael Ward about medieval cosmology, particularly in the Narnia

books. In medieval cosmology, and mostly in our understanding of the stars

before Copernicus, people saw the earth as the center of the universe, and there being seven heavens

stretched out above us, all with this immense meaning, with angels in certain spheres, with each

sphere of the planets meaning something to us.

But when Copernicus came around in Galileo, we began to understand that we were not the center

of the universe. We began to understand that we were orbiting around the sun. And indeed,

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