The Phenomenon of Man

It was a cold (not dark) and stormy.............day.......... before the beginning of a new semester, many years ago at the University of Notre Dame. The group of Juniors, of various academic majors, gathered in a Pangborn Hall dorm room, on the southwest corner of the Main Quad, next to the Rock and the golf course, to review brand new texts, just acquired from the Notre Dame Bookstore. A few regarded the required theology text, translated from the French, with cautious trepidation. A fog of dread encompassed them as they surveyed that book for the final required undergraduate theology course: It was incomprehensible! Turn it upside down, read it backwards or forwards.......the material was unfathomable, pure and simple!

At the start of the first session of that theology class, the professor, Father Charles Henkey, a European, calmly, but pointedly, announced that the students were to return the assigned text to the bookstore and to replace it with a book entitled "The Phenomenon of Man" by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest and paleontologist. Although pleased with the change of text, the students felt that any change would have been welcome. Curious about the new book, it was assumed by the students that the course itself would be a conventional upper-level theology course. Little did they know how their views of Christian theology would be shocked and expanded.........