MadDawg, you’re a schmart guy. I guess we just hit your sweet spot. Church History - Planetary Physics - Politics. An unlikely trilogy.
I ain't that smart, but I went to a smart college (and I wanted to know all about the stars when I was little.) At Saint Johns we really did read the Timaeus, right much Ptolemy, (and more Aristotle - AND Dante) and a little Copernicus and a pretty good chunk of Kepler and Newton.
I'm thinking that one of the things that is being developed in all this is, "Just what IS natural science and how do you do it?" And this development probably accounts for a lot of what seems to us to be church people messing with scientists and the other way round. Sartre or Kierkegaard wouldn't feel a need to develop and explain a cosmology, and Tillich or Pinckaers wouldn't think he had to account for the movements of the planets.
The Church history I got from light reading with inadequate footnotes.
Politics -- is the duty of a free man.
But whatever you meant, your post gave me a nice feeling, and I'm grateful for it. Bless you.