new church life: jan uary/february 2016
Sherri was exposed to the joys of water in several ways in her childhood.
She and her family would go to Core Point, North Carolina, to a summer place
shared by members of her extended family going back to around 1740. Their
properties graced the south shore of the mighty Pamlico River, a great estuary
where the descending freshwater river meets the incoming saltwater tide. The
Pamlico runs roughly eastward into Pamlico Bay, which extends further until
it brushes up against the back of the Outer Banks.
She developed a deep love of the water and nature there. She has been
there more or less every year of her life. In fact, just this past summer she went
back again to visit family there.
In her childhood she also discovered that water was a subject of scholarly
fun as well. Her father, who had a Ph.D. from MIT, taught civil engineering
especially as it relates to water, and conducted research for many years at the
State University of New York at Buffalo. He did some unique experimentation
there in a rotating laboratory he has constructed to simulate the effect of the
earth’s rotation on the motion of large water bodies, such as the Great Lakes.
It was quite a large structure – 15 by 7 feet. His students used it to investigate
circulation and pollutant distribution in a model of Lake Erie and also in a
model of Lake Ontario. It is not hard to imagine that this amazing device made
an impression on Sherri in terms of the fun to be had in the scientific study of
water.
At school Sherri made great friends and managed somehow to keep in
touch with them quite actively through the years. One group of researcher
friends of hers in particular has had regular reunions over the decades,
including a get-together in a beach house sometime after Sherri’s diagnosis.
When she was living and working in Maryland she met Dave Cooper and
they became friends. In 1986 she decided to take a job in Charleston, South
Carolina – an eight-hour drive to the south – but was on a shoestring budget
and didn’t know how she could move down there. Dave had a truck and offered
to borrow a trailer and help her move. This act of old-fashioned chivalry ma de
an impression on Sherri – and she must have made an impression on him.
During the 14 months she was down there Dave made that long drive several
more times just to visit.
Dave himself was and is a man of faith, and he talked to her about
the particular brand of Christianity to which he belongs, known as
Swedenborgianism or “the New Church.” The person whose books started
it, Emanuel Swedenborg, was himself a well-known scientist in 18th century
Sweden. Sherri was intrigued to find a form of Christianity that was particularly
“science-friendly.” For instance, because it reads the Bible as having a deeper,
more psychological level of meaning, the New Church does not espouse
creationism and has no problem with evolution.
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