Climbing Brandon: Science and Faith on Ireland's Holy Mountain - Hardcover

For nearly forty years, Chet Raymo has been exploring the relationship between science, nature, and the humanities as a professor, writer, illustrator and naturalist. In The Path: A One-Mile Walk Through the Universe, he uses the one-mile path he has walked to work for the past four decades as a means of discovering the extraordinary in everyday life.

A professor emeritus of astronomy and physics at Stonehill College in North Easton, Massachusetts, Raymo is the noted author of more than eight books on science, including the highly-praised An Intimate Look at the Night Sky, 365 Starry Nights, The Soul of the Night, Honey from Stone, and Skeptics and True Believers. In 1998, he won a prestigious Lannan Literary Award for the body of his non-fiction work. Raymo is also the author of two novels, In the Falcon's Claw (1990) and The Dork of Cork (1993), which has been sold in twelve languages.

Since 1985, he has written "Science Musings" for the Boston Globe , a weekly science and nature column reflecting upon the human side of science. He is also a frequent contributor to popular science and nature publications.

Chet Raymo and his wife Maureen live in North Easton, Massachusetts.

In The Path, Raymo told the stories of the places he passes on his daily walk from his home in North Easton, Mass., to his workplace at Stonehill College. Here the former BostonGlobe science columnist treats us to a similar meditation on another locale he knows well: Mount Brandon, on the Dingle Peninsula in southwestern Ireland, where Raymo spends summer vacations. Brandon offers him an opportunity to explore "the nexus of several threads in Western thought-Celtic polytheism, Christian monotheism and scientific empiricism." He structures this intellectual journey by way of landmarks along the pilgrim path that ascends the holy Irish mountain. Vividly descriptive prose conveys a strong feeling of place and mood, as Raymo contemplates local geology, natural history and the interplay of climate and topography on the one hand and ancient Irish spirituality and literature on the other. Drawing on academic scholarship, Raymo introduces readers to such ancient seasonal festivals as Lughnasa, Somain and Bealtaine; to stories from Irish myth and folklore; to fragments of ancient Irish verse; and to biographies of Saint Brendan and Saint Patrick. Musing on the relation between scientific observation and what we call superstition, Raymo hovers at the thresholds where geology meets human history and pre-Christian Ireland meets contemporary Irish Catholicism, while dwelling on the significance of a God conceived of as immanent rather than transcendent. The result is an uplifting, though for some perhaps meandering, contemplation of Irish animistic traditions and the power of landscape in the land of "saints and scholars."
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