Saying yes to the noosphere

David Roach reviewed American Catholics and the Church of Tomorrow, by Catherine Osborne, at the Society for US Intellectual History.

"So when translations of the French Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin began to appear in 1959, modernists found a theological touchstone they had long lacked. Particularly attractive was his idea that the world was progressing from biosphere to noosphere, a period, to quote Osborne, 'where thinking human beings would develop a unified network of thought and spirit' (120). Modernists understood themselves as contributing to an increasingly connected and extended 'network of thought and spirit' when they sketched plans for ecumenical submarines and lunar chapels—and when they augmented religious experience with drugs."