Academic literature on the topic 'Ash Wednesday services'

The fires of Ash Wednesday, 1983 have been a significant turning-point in the history of disaster management concepts and practices in Australia. Disaster recovery management has been identified as an important area of management in its own right, containing complex and prolonged programs and activities and requiring the participation of the affected community and involvement from the wide community.Recovery from disaster is no longer seen merely in terms of response and relief activities, or as a physical process of reconstruction. It is an enabling and supportive process, which allows individuals, families and communities to attain a proper level of functioning through the provision of information, resources and specialist services.

Following the Ash Wednesday bushfires of 1983 it became apparent that communities affected by the fires would require additional resources and support at a local level in the task of helping people recover from disaster. Since experience has shown that communities recover best when they are able to plan and manage their own recovery, the State Government accepted a recommendation of the Department of Community Services, to fund through Local Government the short -term appointment of Community Development Officers, who would be responsible to the Area Co-ordinationg Committee. These individuals would be members of the affected communities with particular skils in helping people, families and the community to gain access to the information, resources, services and supports they would need.

Research conducted in 2018 documented the disaster experiences of 56 women and men in Australia aged between 18 and 93 years. This paper draws out the gendered factors that affected their resilience, and in so doing, begins to address the dearth of research related to gendered aspects of long-term disaster resilience. It is unique in capturing the voices of survivors who spoke of events 9 years after the 2009 Black Saturday fires and of earlier fires and floods in Victoria more than 50 years ago, including the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires. Over decades, gendered expectations of men and women significantly hindered resilience. Men spoke of the long-term cost to them of demands to ‘be strong’ in the worst of disasters and reasons they were reluctant to seek help afterwards. Women spoke of their contributions holding a lesser value and of discrimination. Discussions of violence against women and children after disaster, and suicide ideation in anticipation of future disasters offered critical insights. Protective factors identified by informants were not wholly intrinsic to their character but were also physical, such as essential resources provided in the immediate aftermath, and psychological and community support offered in the long-term. Factors that helped resilience departed from the ‘masculine’ model of coping post-disaster by moving away from a refusal to admit trauma and suffering, to community-wide resilience bolstered by widespread emotional, social and psychological support. Genuine community planning for disasters before they strike builds trust and offers insights for emergency management planners.

STANLEY JAKI: Science and Faith in a Realist Perspective by Alessandro Giostra. Rome, Italy: IF Press, 2019. 144 pages. Paperback; $24.24. ISBN: 9788867881857. *The subject of this short introduction--Father Stanley L. Jaki (1924–2009), a giant in the world of science and religion--is more important than this book's contents, a collection of conference papers and articles published between 2015 and 2019. *Readers of this journal should recognize Jaki, a Benedictine priest with doctorates in theology and physics, 1975–1976 Gifford lecturer, 1987 Templeton Prize winner, and professor at Seton Hall University, for his prolific, valuable work in the history of the relations between theology and science. He sharply contrasted Christian and non-Christian/scientific cosmologies and unfortunately, often slipped into polemics and apologetics. The title of Stacy Trasanco's 2014 examination of his work, Science Was Born of Christianity, captures Jaki's key thesis. Science in non-Christian cultures was, in Jaki's (in)famous and frequent characterizations, "stillborn" and a "failure" (e.g., see Giostra, pp. 99, 113). Incidentally, Giostra seems unaware that various Protestant scholars shared Jaki's key thesis and arguments. *The Introduction begins with a quotation from Jaki that so-called conflicts between science and religion "must be seen against objective reality, which alone has the power to unmask illusions." Jaki continued, "There may be clashes between science and religion, or rather between some religionists and some scientists, but no irresolvable fundamental conflict" (p. 15). *This raises two other crucial aspects of Jaki's approach: his realist epistemology and his claim that, properly understood, science and Christian theology cannot be in conflict. Why? Because what Jaki opposed was not science itself--which he saw as specific knowledge of the physical world that was quantifiable and mathematically expressible--but ideologies that were attached to science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that is, materialism, naturalism, reductionism, positivism, pantheism, and atheism. *For Jaki, the real problem for Christian approaches to the natural world was the scientism which dismissed theology, especially Catholicism, as superstition, dogmatism, and delusion. Jaki followed the groundbreaking work of Pierre Duhem in arguing that the impetus theory of the fourteenth-century philosopher John Buridan was the first sign of the principle of inertia, the first law of Newtonian physics. One of the foundational shifts in the birth of a new "revolutionary" science in the Christian West was a post-Aristotelian understanding of bodies in motion (both uniform and uniformly accelerating: see chapter three for more details). *The first chapter is a bio- and bibliographical essay by an admiring Antonio Colombo that traces and situates Jaki the historian as a man of both science and faith. Chapter two lays out Jaki's critical realism and theses about the history of science and theology, in contrast to scientisms past and present that claim scientific reason as the sole trustworthy route to legitimate knowledge. The roles played by the doctrine of creation ex nihilo and the Christology of the pre-existent Logos in Jaki's cosmological thinking are also outlined. *Many readers will be most interested in the third chapter which surveys Jaki's writing about the notorious case of Galileo, condemned by the church in 1633 for defending Copernicus. Jaki detected scientific and theological errors in the positions of both Galileo and the church. For instance, Galileo did not provide proof of the motion of the earth around the sun. Nor did the church understand errors in Aristotelian science. Galileo was right, however, in arguing that the Bible's purpose was not to convey scientific knowledge; while the church's rejection of heliocentric cosmology was correct, given the dearth of convincing evidence for it. *Chapter four is of wider interest than its title, "The Errors of Hegelian Idealism," might suggest. Jaki's belief that only Christian theology could give birth to the exact sciences is reviewed, along with his rejection of conflict and concord models of faith and science. His critiques of Hegelian and Marxist views of the world are thoughtfully discussed. *Jaki was unrelentingly hostile to all types of pantheism, and Plato was the most influential purveyor of that erroneous philosophy. Chapter five outlines Jaki's objections to Platonism, as well as to Plotinus's view of the universe as an emanation from an utterly transcendent One, and to Giordano Bruno's neo-Platonic animism and Hermeticism. *Jaki's interpretation of medieval Islamic cosmologists is the subject of the fifth chapter, in which the Qur'an, Averroes, and Avicenna are examined and found wanting. Monotheism by itself could not lead to science. Incorrect theology blinded those without an understanding of the world as God's creation or of Christ as Word and Savior from seeing scientific truth. This chapter is curious in several respects. On page 98, Giostra equates Christ as the only begotten Son with Jesus as the only "emanation from the Father." Emanationism is a Gnostic, Manichaean, and neo-Platonic concept; it is not, to my knowledge, part of orthodox Catholic Trinitarian discourse. On pages 101–2, the presence of astrology in the Qur'an disqualifies it as an ancestor of modern science. But astrology then was not yet divorced from astronomy. Astrological/astronomical imagery and terminology were integral to ancient cosmologies and apocalypses, including Jewish, Christian, and Muslim ones. Lastly, pages 104–5 feature quotations in untranslated Latin. *Chapter seven is a review of the 2016 edition of Jaki's Science and Creation; this is one more example of content repeated elsewhere in the book. "Benedict XVI and the limits of scientific learning" is the eighth and final chapter. The former pope is presented as a Jaki-like thinker in his views of science and faith. Strangely, Benedict does not cite Jaki; this absense weakens Giostra's case somewhat. *Jaki--whose faith was shaped by the eminent French theologian and historian of medieval thought, Etienne Gilson--was a diehard Roman Catholic, wary of Protestant thought, defender of priestly celibacy and of the ineligibility of women for ordination. On the other hand, his study of both Duhem and Gilson probably sensitized Jaki to ideological claims made by scientists. *As a historian of science, Jaki was meticulous and comprehensive in his research with primary documents. His interpretations of historical texts were as confident and swaggering as his critiques of scientists and scientism were withering. Among Jaki's more interesting and helpful contributions to scholarship are his translations and annotations of such important primary texts as Johann Heinrich Lambert's Cosmological Letters (1976), Immanuel Kant's Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1981), and Bruno's The Ash Wednesday Supper (1984). *Personally, I have found much of value in Jaki's The Relevance of Physics (1966); Brain, Mind and Computers (1969); The Paradox of Olbers' Paradox (1969); The Milky Way (1972); Planets and Planetarians (1978); The Road of Science and the Ways to God (1978); Cosmos and Creator (1980); Genesis 1 through the Ages (1998); The Savior of Science (2000); Giordano Bruno: A Martyr of Science? (2000); Galileo Lessons (2001); Questions on Science and Religion (2004); The Mirage of Conflict between Science and Religion (2009); and the second enlarged edition of his 1974 book, Science and Creation: From Eternal Cycles to an Oscillating Universe (2016). *Jaki also published studies of figures whose life and work most impressed him personally. These include three books (1984, 1988, 1991) on the Catholic physicist and historian of cosmology, Pierre Duhem, author of the ten-volume Système du Monde, and studies of English converts to Catholicism, John Henry, Cardinal Newman (2001, 2004, 2007) and G. K. Chesterton (1986, new ed., 2001). *Among Jaki's books not mentioned by Giostra but of interest to readers of this journal are The Origin of Science and the Science of its Origin (1979), Angels, Apes, and Men (1988), and Miracles and Physics (2004). For a complete Jaki bibliography, see http://www.sljaki.com/. *No translator is identified in the book under review; my guess is that Giostra, an Italian, was writing in English. Although generally clear and correct, the book contains enough small errors and infelicities to suggest that the services of a professional translator were not used. Not counting blank, title, and contents pages, this book has but 128 pages, including lots of block quotations. *For those unfamiliar with Jaki's work and not too interested in detailed studies in the history and philosophy of science and religion, this introduction is a decent start--and perhaps an end point as well. I strongly encourage curious readers to consult Jaki's own books, including his intellectual autobiography A Mind's Matter (2002). For other scholarly English-language perspectives on his work, see Paul Haffner, Creation and Scientific Creativity: A Study in the Thought of S. L. Jaki (2nd ed., 2009); Science and Orthodoxy [special issue of the Saint Austin Review on Jaki], vol. 14, no. 3 (2014); and Paul Carr and Paul Arveson, eds., Stanley Jaki Foundation International Congress 2015 (2020). *Reviewed by Paul Fayter, a retired pastor and historian of Victorian science and theology, who lives in Hamilton, Ontario.