Ockham's Razor

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University and an avid outdoor recreationist. She is also the
author of The Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek, and
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Hom

Wade Rowland’s eighth book embraces several genres, including travel
narrative and intellectual quest. The setting is Provence in
southeastern France, a beautiful area whose medieval roots are still
visible—in short, a perfect setting for an exploration of modern
materialism, philosophical reflections, and religious faith.

William of Ockham, a medieval scholar and theologian, was the thinker
who precipitated the great divide between science and religion, fact and
values. Truth became linked to science and goodness to religion.
Ockham’s razor was a logical technique stripped to the bare essentials
and denuded of spiritual and metaphysical content.

Rowland is a former CBC journalist who writes and lectures on the new
media and makes a living from a virtual corporation on the Internet. In
Ockham’s Razor, this very modern man straddles Ockham’s divide with
surprising grace. The mix of family travel narrative with historical and
philosophical reflection is smooth yet provocative. Rowland saw Provence
as an area rich in intellectual and spiritual history and struggle, an
area that led him to wonder “if there might not be a metaphor here for
our own time of moral and ethical struggle.” His well-written and at
times profound book is a worthwhile contribution to our century’s
unresolved debate on science and spirituality.