This lecture was given on October 14, 2022, at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., as part of the Thomistic Circles conference entitled, "Life in the Cosmos: Contemporary Science, Philosophy, and Theology on the Origin and Persistence of Life on Earth (and Beyond?)."

For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at thomisticinstitute.org.

About the speaker:

Jonathan I. Lunine is The David C. Duncan Professor in the Physical Sciences at Cornell University and Director of the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science, His research focuses on astrophysics, planetary science and astrobiology. In addition to his responsibilities in the classroom, he serves as Interdisciplinary Scientist on the James Webb Space Telescope project and is a coinvestigator on the Juno mission currently in orbit around Jupiter. Lunine is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is the 2014 recipient of the Jean Dominique Cassini Medal of the European Geosciences Union. He is the author of Astrobiology: A Multidisciplinary Approach and Earth: Evolution of a Habitable World. Lunine obtained a B.S. in physics and astronomy from the University of Rochester (1980), an M.S. (1983) and a Ph.D. (1985) in planetary science from the California Institute of Technology. He lives in Ithaca New York, where he is a member of St. Catherine of Siena parish. In 2016 Lunine helped to found the Society of Catholic Scientists.

About the conference:

What is life? How did biological life arise? What makes life persist and might it exist elsewhere in the cosmos? What would that mean?

Consider these questions and more with the Thomistic Institute at the Fall Thomistic Circles conference, Life in the Cosmos: Contemporary Science, Philosophy, and Theology on the Origin and Persistence of Life on Earth (and Beyond?). The two-day conference at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. features a stellar, cross-disciplinary lineup of speakers, scientists Jonathan Lunine (Cornell University) and Maureen Condic (University of Utah), philosopher Christopher Frey (University of South Carolina), and theologian Fr. Mauriusz Tabaczek, O.P. (Angelicum). This conference is part of the Thomistic Institute’s Scientia Project.