A Few Good Reads

By the blog editors

We are pleased to notify you of two articles written by our fellow blogger Jesuits – Adam Hincks and Gregory Kennedy, respectively – both of which were featured as cover stories in recent issues of the America magazine. They are as follows:

Wonders of the Universe: new scientific discoveries and old truths, by Adam Hincks, S.J.

Trash Talk: a Christian response to our throwaway society, by Gregory Kennedy, S.J.

Our special thanks to the editors of America magazine for generously making Adam's article accessible to the public for free. Note that it will remain so temporarily. Read it while you can!

Collaboration and Communion

By Adam Hincks, S.J.

And from my pillow, looking forth by light
Of moon or favouring stars, I could behold
The antechapel where the statue stood
Of Newton with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.
(Wordsworth)

A research group I work with, the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) collaboration, has recently published a couple of exciting papers. In one of them, we demonstrated the first-ever detection of the average motion of distant galaxy clusters using the afterglow of the Big Bang as a back-light. A few months earlier, we reported our discovery of an abnormally large, very ancient cluster of galaxies.  Perhaps because the catchy name we gave it―El Gordo―our announcement was picked up by not a few news agencies (BBC, CBC, NPR, CNN).