Renovatio

12/25/2025

"Music and the Decline of Civilization" invites you to consider whether music indicates more about a culture than is immediately apparent. Now, you can listen to this article wherever you enjoy podcasts.

Podcast Episode · Renovatio: The Podcast · 12/03/2025 · 46m

12/24/2025

We assume scientists are neutral observers of phenomena. But Annie Darwin's death at age ten shaped her father's theodicy—which became his biology. When writing on his inability to see "design" and "beneficence" in nature, he wrote: "There seems to me too much misery in the world."

Studying Darwin’s life and his philosophical influences tests our beliefs about “science” and helps us to be informed, granular, and selective about our commitments.

12/23/2025

If ghosts were observable, would science accept them as real?

Consider a thought experiment:

“Some future, credibly scientific, empirical discovery of real, causally efficacious ghosts. Much to our surprise, the thought goes, these ghosts have turned out to be observable and to have certain bizarre properties that do not fit well with our previous understanding of the natural world. What would a card-carrying naturalist’s response to this surprising discovery be? Would it count as evidence against naturalism as a metaphysical thesis?

It seems like it should, since one of the principal motivations for being a naturalist in the first place is to exclude “weird,” “spooky,” or “immaterial” things from one’s world. Yet, as Raleigh notes, were this to happen, “there would not be any point in asking whether ghosts are ‘natural’ or ‘supernatural’.… Once we admit that they are part of reality, what further possible theoretical interest would be served by asserting or denying that they are part of ‘nature’?” In other words, would we take such a discovery to falsify naturalism, or would we take it as a particularly surprising broadening of our conception of what constitutes the natural world?”

The broader academic paradigm underlying modern science not only misrepresents its origins but profoundly alienates most—if not all—wayfaring souls.

12/23/2025

We assume scientist are neutral observers of phenomena. But Annie Darwin's death at age ten shaped her father's theodicy—which became his biology. When writing on his inability to see "design" and "beneficence" in nature, he wrote: "There seems to me too much misery in the world."
https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/what-darwin-believed-and-why-it-matters

12/22/2025

"True originality comes from depth, not novelty. Real creativity emerges from engaging eternal principles so thoroughly that something genuinely fresh appears." —Emilio Alzueta

The paradox of authentic creativity explored through Martin Lings's sonnet.

https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/the-readiness-of-the-soul

12/21/2025

"When My servant comes to Me walking, I come to him running." —Hadith Qudsi

Michael Sugich shares how this played out in his journey to Mecca after 20 years of yearning.

Adversity can be the best teacher—because through it one is rendered helpless and in need, which is, in fact, our true condition.

12/19/2025

Seyyed Hossein Nasr explains that the environmental crisis is precipitated by spiritual and material causes:

“The environmental crisis is not the result of only material causes, since it is also rooted in a spiritual crisis that arose first in the modern West, although few realize this truth. In the midst of much discourse and concern about environmental degradation today, most people in the West, and many in the Islamic world, believe that the solution to the environmental crisis lies simply in a wise and correct application of modern science and technology and a wise and correct practice of modern economics.

The environmental crisis, however, is not only a natural and material crisis; it is grounded in a spiritual and intellectual crisis that began with modernism itself. This crisis began in the West and has now spread to the whole globe, including the Islamic world, which is not only a passive recipient of environmental pollution but is also itself a transgressor against nature, having actively adopted modernist modes of thought, action, and production.”

A comprehensive Islamic environmental framework needs methods of architecture, scientific study, engineering, art, and craftsmanship that respect what it means to be human.

12/19/2025

Charles Darwin in his own words on design versus chance: "With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me—I am bewildered—I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I should wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us.

There seems to me too much misery in the world.

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed.

On the other hand I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe & especially the nature of man, & to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.

Let each man hope & believe what he can."

https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/what-darwin-believed-and-why-it-matters

12/19/2025

A new article from Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Munjed M. Murad for argues that a comprehensive Islamic environmental framework must respect what it means to be human.
https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/salient-features-of-an-islamic-framework-for-environmental-sustainability

12/18/2025

Half the world is praying for rain while the other half complains about it.

We've all been there.

New conversation: Dr. Nasrin Rouzati with Renovatio editor-in-chief Hamza Yusuf on rediscovering gratitude and the spiritual purpose of trials:

A conversation examining Qur’anic teachings on the providential purpose of both suffering and happiness in our lives.

12/17/2025

NEW: "Is Naturalism Ideology?" by Joshua Lee Harris

Naturalism is the view that reality is exhausted by nature, containing nothing supernatural. This pointedly anti-religious philosophy may also be anti-science.
https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/is-naturalism-ideology

12/16/2025

On the yearning for beauty: "It inspired many writers of the black intellectual tradition—so often weighed down by sorrow and suffering—generation after generation, to act creatively in pursuit of the beautiful vision of a more just world.

This same yearning led Phillis Wheatley, a young girl kidnapped from the west coast of Africa in the eighteenth century, to petition the poetic muse to inspire her writing in the cause of liberty during the American Revolution.

It was this yearning that powered Frederick Douglass’s fiery, incisive critique and oratory in the nineteenth century. And it was this yearning for the beautiful vision that led Anna Julia Cooper, born into slavery but destined for freedom, to bring the liberal arts of literature, history, and philosophy to black working-class men and women in the twentieth century, when the rest of American society declared them undeserving and unfit for such an education." -Angel Parham

https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/the-power-of-beauty-in-dark-places