Before I get started: did you know there are a bunch of new tshirts and things available in my store? (You can also just go to the ‘Store’ tab.) Shirts and things with fish and lampreys and flamingoes! Hot damn! I have seen these shirts in the wild, and they look awesome.

Ok, but also:

A long time ago I had a little obsession with the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes books by Laurie R. King. Well, that is to say I really enjoyed the first one – The Beekeeper’s Apprentice – reading it over and over again, and then sort of dropped off when she turned the later books into romances between Russell and Holmes. That seemed to miss the point, to me.

Anyway! At one point in The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, plucky young Mary Russell is trying to freak her logical, analytical mentor out by telling him that she wants to study theology at Oxford. And she goes into a narratorial aside, explaining that she actually studied both theology and physics, and that it was only in later life when she realized that the two fields of study (in their highest echelons) are separated by only the thinnest of membranes.

I don’t believe those were her exact words, but you get the picture.

I was always a child who liked to argue in favor of evolution by saying that if God is omnipotent, there is no reason he could not have effected evolution, and that therefore there is no insurmountable divide between science and faith. So I was very open to Mary Russell’s assertion that physics and theology might be linked: the philosophical investigation of a higher power, and a science whose own rules are theoretically nullified by great events (see: the Big Bang). Why not?

Plus – she had adventures! With Sherlock Holmes! Neat!

I guess that’s all I have to say today. I really loved that book, because it made me feel, as a pre-teen and teenager, that my mind and soul were both worth something, and were going to meet great possibilities.