{"id":142,"date":"2018-03-07T19:02:03","date_gmt":"2018-03-07T19:02:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/?p=142"},"modified":"2018-03-07T19:02:03","modified_gmt":"2018-03-07T19:02:03","slug":"religion-in-sci-fi-the-sparrow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/?p=142","title":{"rendered":"Religion in Sci-Fi: The Sparrow"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Most of my previous posts on religion dealt with sci-fi novels that mentioned the topic, had subplots of a spiritual nature, or provided a quote that piqued my interest.\u00a0 One such quote from this book is, \u201cTo make creation, God had to remove himself from some part of the universe, so something besides Himself could exist.\u201d\u00a0 That is something relevant to my own series, and I won\u2019t delve into it in a blog post.\u00a0 <em>The Sparrow<\/em>, by Mary Doria Russell, however, was an exciting discovery for me.\u00a0 It is an exploration of first contact between humans and aliens from a religious point of view.\u00a0 Jesuit explorers travel to a civilization a few light years distant, whose culture has recognizable elements of good and evil.\u00a0 The main character thinks of these aliens as \u201cGod\u2019s other children\u201d, at least at first.\u00a0 However, no alien Jesus Christ is mentioned.\u00a0 The aliens seem to be heathens requiring salvation, which may occur in a sequel.\u00a0 But that omission seems to me equivalent to the Church refusing to believe that the earth did not orbit the sun.\u00a0 Despite that omission, the internal religious struggle of the main character is riveting and full of complex concepts.\u00a0 This book is definitely worthy of its inclusion in any list of sci-fi classics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Most of my previous posts on religion dealt with sci-fi novels that mentioned the topic, had subplots of a spiritual nature, or provided a quote that piqued my interest.\u00a0 One such quote from this book is, \u201cTo make creation, God had to remove himself from some part of the universe, so something besides Himself could [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=142"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":143,"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142\/revisions\/143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}