The main warning I’ve given to prospective writers for The Behemoth is that we don’t do polemics. Debates can be helpful. Iron sharpens iron. But while The Behemoth runs a lot of articles that draw from science, we won’t argue about origins or climate change or most of the fights people think about when someone says “Christianity and science.” We’re a magazine searching for awe, wonder, and beautiful orthodoxy.
More recently, I’ve started adding another warning: We try very hard not to publish sermon illustrations. Like debates, sermon illustrations can be wonderful and helpful. (Hello, friends at PreachingToday.com!) But sometimes, when I hear science used to illustrate a theological point, it can suck a lot of the life out of the science story. (The same can be true for historical anecdotes.) I want the science to provoke awe and wonder. I don’t want it just to be an example for “the real point.”
But my favorite Behemoth pieces are the ones that don’t end with the science, where a discovery about the world truly prompts thinking about who God is. And in this issue, Joel Bezaire’s piece on fractals and Chad Meeks’s article on zombie ants both show a real love for their subjects and a real desire to think about what kind of God created them. I’ll admit I was skeptical about both pitches at first. But I can’t argue with their results.
