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• This debate continues amid a renewed conflict over faith and reason in academia, the Boston Globesays: a duel between "atheistic scientists and intellectual Christians." Natalie Angier speaks for the former in an American Scholar essay called "My God Problem—and Theirs," which says scientists should be more outspoken against "biblical supernaturalism." But the Globe noticed a piece in First Things by Jesuit theologian Cardinal Avery Dulles called "The Rebirth of Apologetics." Dulles affirms that "God's grace does not circumvent or suppress our native powers, but guides them so that they may act more perfectly." Contemporary apologetics has two parts, Dulles says. "First, it uses philosophy to prove the existence of God and the possibility of revelation; then it turns to historiography to vindicate the biblical record of sacred history and its culmination in Jesus Christ."

The Globe glosses over the philosophy part, content to sum up Dulles' model as "a new, more humanistic sort of apologetics" that relies primarily on the testimony of the Apostles, calling the effort but "a new avenue for believers to evangelize nonbelievers." Such simplified summary will do little to allay the Globe's fear that in the debate over faith and reason, "worldviews seem to slide past one another like planets in orbits that will never cross."

Related: B&C series in response to the papal encyclical on faith and reason.

From the New York Times :

CAPE TOWN — Thirty-three years ago, the American novelist John Fante gave Robert Towne, a screenwriter and aspiring Hollywood director, a copy of his novel Ask The Dust. Inside, Mr. Fante wrote, "To Robert, in the hope he will take this to far places." Whatever he meant, it is a sure bet that it was not Cape Town, 9,992 miles from Hollywood, at the time a sleepy seaport appended to Africa's nether regions. Yet today, this is where Mr. Towne is directing a movie based on Ask the Dust, a love-hate story set in 1930's Los Angeles … Mr. Towne calls it the perfect place to recreate a slice of Los Angeles as it looked then — even better than real Los Angeles, where skyscrapers and shopping malls have buried any sense of the past. "The weather, the beach, the sky, the desert," Mr. Towne said, as he wrapped up a day's shooting. "It is just a strange, serendipitous thing that we are in South Africa, because nothing could look more like Southern California than this does." Serendipitious for Cape Town, too. Long a favorite location for fashion shoots and advertising stills, the city is also catching on with major film producers.

PALO ALTO, Calif. — "Silicon Valley is back" is on the lips of eager entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, who [say] the three-year-long depression is over. But other signs tell a different story. The famed traffic jams of Silicon Valley's boom times are still uncommon. A last-minute reservation at some of the area's hot restaurants, like Tamarine or Spago Palo Alto, can still be had. And a suite in a gleaming office park that would have cost nearly $10 a square foot in monthly rent in 1999 can now be had for less than $3. Big portions of sprawling projects built on optimism in the mid-1990's, like the Midpoint Technology Park in Redwood City, sit dark and unoccupied. On Mission College Boulevard in Santa Clara, 750,000 square feet of office space is still available in an archipelago of office parks built during the boom. … In more sober moments, even the optimists admit that this period is something quite different from the boom of the late 1990's.

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