Haught should definitely know something about Catholics. He was raised in a strong Catholic family in rural Virginia, and at the age of thirteen he headed off to seminary where he spent ten years, dropping out in his early twenties. The year was 1966, Haught was twenty-three, and the priesthood was not for him. But he had undergone an important transformation during his formative time inside the inner sanctums of Christianity. His young religious soul had grown to distrust the strong “otherworldly” emphasis of his tradition as it was then taught and practiced—the notion that our spiritual priorities should be focused not on this world of sin and suffering but on preparing for life in the next world. And simultaneously, he had heard the call of a new religious spirit, a sense of renewal and optimism expressed most strongly in two events. First, the Church itself was undergoing a major transformation as a result of the Second Vatican Council, a gathering of theologians that took place in Rome from 1962 to 1965 to overhaul the tenets and practices of Catholicism in light of the changing realities of modern life. Second, and perhaps most important, Haught was exposed to the words of a deceased religious thinker whose recently published works were stirring up the Catholic hierarchy—Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

“I was in the seminary during the procedures of the Second Vatican Council, and all along we had hints of renewal,” Haught recalled a little later as we sat under the generous shade of a local tree. “But it was still a very otherworldly type of spirituality that was emphasized. I left because I was beginning to become discontented with that, and by that time, I had read the writings of Teilhard de Chardin. Now the teachers themselves couldn’t teach his work in class, but my more forward-looking professors would encourage us to read his ideas. And especially after reading Teilhard, I saw a possibility of another way of looking at things.”

For Haught and other theologians caught up in the spirit of the times, Teilhard’s work represented a break with an older form of Christianity, one in which the context of theology was classical philosophy, largely influenced by Plato. For Plato and much of neo-Platonic thought, the material world was seen as imperfect because it exists in a state of unpredictable flux and change. It is highly contingent, subject to chance, and essentially unruly, the shadow side of the transcendent order of the “Kosmos.” The idea of becoming, of process, of development, was disparaged in this Platonic outlook as being antithetical to the unchanging order and perfection of God. We should not look to the untrustworthy fickleness of the world as our model for divine contemplation but upward toward the “fixity of the heavens.” While the ongoing march of knowledge has certainly required a few major upgrades to this ancient model, it was Teilhard, according to Haught, who saw the need for a complete theological overhaul.

“Teilhard was one of the first scientists in the twentieth century to become aware that the universe is a story,” Haught explained to me, his voice rising a little. “It’s not just a place of imperfection, what Galileo called ‘the sink of all dull refuse,’ caricaturing the Platonic view. No, the universe is a place of creativity and becoming, a place of becoming more. Teilhard knew astronomy and he knew some physics and he knew the history of science and he knew what the Galilean revolution implied. It meant that we could no longer look spatially somewhere else to find the perfection that we’re looking for. We have to look toward the future. The future became for Teilhard the place where we lift up our eyes and our hearts to have something to aspire to.”

Invigorated by the implications of this new theological mindset, Haught’s own future took a new direction. He headed back to the classroom, back to the religious and philosophical texts that had informed his youth, only this time as a layperson, receiving a doctorate in religious studies and eventually landing at Georgetown. As the influence of the Second Vatican Council began to wane, and the wave of reformation that characterized the Church for many years began to give way to a wave of retrenchment, Haught worked to develop and expand the theological foundation of a new kind of evolutionary religious orientation. But it was another subject that would come to occupy his attention—science. As a theologian interested in the spiritual implications of evolutionary science, Haught’s work naturally bridged these two often-contentious domains, and he began to worry about the growing influence in the academic world (and by extension the entire society) not of science but of scientific materialism or scientific naturalism—the idea, as he puts it, that deadness is the ultimate origin and destiny of all being. “It’s self-sabotaging for science,” he explains, “especially in a culture like ours where ninety percent of people say that they believe in God.”

Haught’s work eventually connected him to a small but growing network of scholars who are exploring the relationship between science and religion, a network largely nurtured by the funding largess of the late Sir John Templeton. More recently, it has also earned him some fame. In 2005, he stood side by side with scientists and testified at the infamous Dover, Pennsylvania, evolution trial in arguing against teaching intelligent design in schools—claiming that ID was a religious belief system and thus had no place in the classroom. Yet, true to his own convictions, he cautioned against the false hegemony of science as well, telling the jury that materialism is “a belief system, no less a belief system than is intelligent design. And as such, it has absolutely no place in the classroom, and teachers of evolution should not lead their students craftily or explicitly to … feel that they have to embrace a materialistic worldview in order to make sense of evolution.”

This balanced perspective, along with his careful scholarship, has also earned Haught the respect of those who draw quite different conclusions about the metaphysics of evolution. The renowned Darwinian scholar and secular philosopher Michael Ruse, for example, recently referred to Haught as “our most distinguished writer today on the science-religion relationship.” In this respect, Haught is part of a rich tradition, and it is no accident that he cites as his influences not only Teilhard but also individuals such as Alfred North Whitehead, Paul Tillich, and Karl Rahner, all spiritually inspired thinkers who embraced the revelations of science.

As evidenced by this list, Haught’s religious influences are mostly Western. During our conversations, he expressed familiarity with and respect for Eastern spirituality, in particular Buddhism, but even in the heyday of Eastern spiritual experiments in the 1970s, he was never tempted away from the traditions of his youth. “I didn’t think that I needed to go East to find liberation,” he notes. And yet his own theology is so different from that of his upbringing that he can no longer speak about his work with most members of his family. “We get along very well,” he explains, “but I don’t share this with them. Religiously, we’re in two different worlds.”

As we sat and talked under the trees in the hot summer sun at this quiet retreat center, I became more aware of the unusual sense of old and new that Haught seems to embody. In part, it has to do with his upbringing. He was raised, as he describes it, in “several ages of history.” First there was the seminary and what he describes as essentially a “medievla culture,” albeit one that held some interest and excitement for a young boy on the verge of adolescence. Later as a young man, the modern world “got its teeth in me,” and he emerged into adulthood along with an entire generation riding a wave of hope, change, and renewal. While Haught did not participate in the more radical social experiments of the sixties—no drugs, free love, or experimental communes—he considers himself a child of that time and still speaks fondly of that historic moment when culture tried to take hold of its own evolution and “imagine something new.” For him, the revolutions of the sixties have echoes in the New Testament. “In those biblical days, a wave of hope just swept over the ancient world,” he explained to me, “and if we are going to take the New Testament seriously, why shouldn’t we transplant that renewal mentality into our own age? So I’ve tried to remain a man of the late 1960s throughout my life, and that’s the spirit that I bring to my theology as well.”

There is little doubt he has succeeded, and then some. He has earned a reputation as an impeccable scholar, and his work has garnered him the attention of integral philosophers, evolutionary theorists, and independent spiritual thinkers well beyond the boundaries of Christian thought. And yet he has stayed true to his Catholic roots; he lives and works comfortably in the context of that hoary tradition, and he finds his inspiration for a new integration of science and spirit in that most traditional of Christian texts—the Bible.

“The first thing you should think about when you hear the word ‘God’ in the English scriptures is liberation,” Haught declared. “This is how the Israelites came to conceptualize God.” I must have looked surprised or doubtful, because Haught sort of paused, acknowledging my skepticism, and continued: “Not everyone agrees with me, but basically, biblical religion is all about renewal, promise, and liberation, and that seemed to me to be enough of a theological framework on which to plant my interest in evolution as well. I view evolution not just in terms of biology but in terms of the development of the whole universe from the monotony of radiation to the complexity of the human brain and the emergence of civilization and culture. And when you look at it in that sweeping way, you see that the universe is a pretty interesting place, and it’s been interested in bringing about new being, more being, more intense being, from the very beginning.”