Speaker Series: The Rev. Pan Conrad presents "Catastrophe, Resilience and Evolution: How God Redeems Everything"

On Tuesday, March 29th for the spring offering of the St. James Speaker Series brought the Rev. Pamela G. Conrad to St. James for a presentation of "Catastrophe, Resilience and Evolution: How God Redeems Everything"

Catastrophe, Resilience and Evolution: How God Redeems Everything
The Earth was forged out of dust from chaos. God has always redeemed the chaos, maybe not in the timing that we desire, but always! We will travel back in time to the Beginning, when God was making the heavens and the Earth. Our beautiful Earth has been subjected to many cataclysmic things since it was formed four-and-a-half billion years ago. We might even characterize these things as catastrophes, but that would be selling the redemptive power of God short! On our journey, we will learn about several events in the Earth’s history that have shaped its evolution into a place that supports life as we know it. We have not yet discovered whether God has made life elsewhere yet, but you can be confident that the God of the universe has the capacity to make anything and everything out of the same dust with which you are fearfully and wonderfully made. As we explore, we will learn about the significance of these catastrophic milestones in our history and we will talk about what the future may hold. This will be an evening without jargon and an abundant opportunity to ask a priest and space explorer about why this Earth, our island home is so special.

About the speaker: The Rev. Pamela G. Conrad, Ph.D.

Pamela Conrad is an Episcopal priest and rector of St. Alban’s Parish in Glen Burnie, MD. She serves as the chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland, a group charged with working on racial reconciliation, truth-telling and transformation. She also serves as the Warden for the North American Province of The Society of Ordained Scientists.

But wait…there’s more! She is also an astrobiologist and planetary scientist specializing in understanding how planets do or do not evolve into habitable environments, and she is presently involved in the exploration of Mars with the Perseverance Rover and its companion, the Ingenuity helicopter. She has an appointment as a research scientist at The Earth and Planets Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution of Science in Washington, DC.

As both a priest and a scientist, one of her priorities is to help people feel confident to engage both their critical thinking and their faith in all aspects of life, using what we can learn from exploring nature as an approach to understanding the relatedness of all that God has created.