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ACS Podcast: Catholic Journalist Covers Faith & Science Beat Amid Its Hazards
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April 28, 2021Denyse O’Leary, the author of several books and myriad articles, specializes in covering the intersection of faith and science. Her work has given her a perch to observe the growing politicization of science and how special interests with deep financial backers suppress critical voices, and make the true scientific exploration more difficult and even potentially career-ending.
I met Denyse O’Leary more than two decades ago at a conference of The Word Guild, a Canadian-based association of writers and editors who are Christian. She was an Anglican in those days, living in Toronto and attending a parish that seemed to be flourishing---until various debates about controversial doctrinal issues prompted her to cross the Tiber to become Catholic, some years before Anglicanorum coetibus. O’Leary happily became a full-fledged member of the Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, and when she moved to Ottawa she became a member of my parish the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
O’Leary moved to Victoria, B.C. about a year or so ago, just before the pandemic shut down in-person worship services in the province, but she has found a way to tuck into the Ordinariate community there St. John Henry Newman Catholic Church, led by Fr. Lee Kenyon.
She has covered the intersection of faith and science in her book Faith@Science: Why Science Needs Faith in the Twenty-First Century and in her book By Design or By Chance: The growing controversy on the origins of life in the universe she examined the debates surrounding Darwinian evolution and intelligent design. O’Leary keeps up with these controversies as a professional blogger at Uncommondescent.com
In The Spiritual Brain: a neuroscientist’s case for the existence of the soul with neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, O’Leary and Beauregard look at, among other things, how materialistic and deterministic views that dominate science cannot explain consciousness. In other words, our brains are not merely “meat computers.”
More recently, she is editor and blogger at mindmatters.ai, a source of information and opinion about artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence can’t supplant human intelligence, she says, but it is making government and big tech surveillance possible on an unprecedented scale.
In an era where dissent and even questions are suppressed with a glib, “because science!” O’Leary offers in our latest ACS podcast a fresh perspective and some food for thought for Ordinariate members.
