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The Not-Yet God: Carl Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, and the Relational Whole

We are a species between axial periods. Thus, our religious myths are struggling to find new connections in a global, ecological order. Delio proposes the new myth of relational holism; that is, the search for a new connection to divinity in an age of quantum physics, evolution, and pluralism. The idea of relational holism is one that is rooted in the God-world relationship, beginning with the Book of Genesis, but finds its real meaning in quantum physics and the renewed relationship between mind and matter. Our story, therefore, will traverse across the fields of science, scripture, theology, history, culture and psychology. Our guides for a new myth of relational holism are the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, and the Jesuit scientist-theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The complex human can no longer be simplified to one view or another: one must see the whole of our existence or one does not see at all.

About the Author

Ilia Delio

Ilia Delio, OSF is a Systematic-Constructive theologian who works at the interface of science, religion and culture. She holds a doctorate in Pharmacology from Rutgers University, Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences and a doctorate in Historical Theology from Fordham University. She is the author of twenty-six books including The Not-Yet God: Carl Jung, Teilhard de Chardin and the Relational WholeThe Hours of the Universe: Reflections on God, Science and the Human Journey which won the 2022 Gold Nautilus Book Award, and Making All Things New: Catholicity, Cosmology and Consciousness, a finalist for the 2019 Michael Ramsey Prize. She is founder and Executive Director of the World Institute for Science, Religion and Culture.