Science and Literature Meet on the Wing at Templeton Book Forum

By Ron Hogan on May 9, 2008 12:45 PM

“I wouldn’t say that birds are Jewish,” Jonathan Rosen said, with some light chuckling from the audience, during the Q&A portion of his lecture at the John Templeton Foundation‘s inaugural book forum earlier this week. Elaborating on the question, he emphasized that the condition birds spoke to, the one that inspired the questioning comparison—”we do not know exactly where we belong, where our native ground is, where our homes are”—was, particularly in the early 21st century, more universal in scope. Other questions from the audience were more playful: “Are there bagel-eating pigeons riding the A train into Manhattan?” Rosen responded in disbelief to one such query.

Rosen’s talk—inspired by his new book, The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature, presented birdwatching as, in his words, “a useful framework for thinking about certain large questions” of religion and science, and the possibility that they might find common ground. He spoke of 19th-century scientists like Alfred Russel Wallace, who came up with the theory of evolution independently of Charles Darwin—”the greatest biologist of the 19th century,” Rosen said, “but also the greatest schlmiel.” (One of the reasons you know Darwin’s name but probably not Wallace’s, for example, is that, on the way home from a four-year research expedition to the Amazon, his ship sank off the coast of Brazil, taking all his specimens with it.)

In a recent article for the Los Angeles-based Jewish Journal, Rosen echoes the first sections of his lecture, pointing to “the desire to find in nature, or perhaps behind nature, something transcendent—something divine” as “a religious question, an environmental question, a national question, a global question and also a personal one.” And, when he’s the one sorting through it, a captivating one as well.