Ilia Delio, OSF, PhD
Does God Need Us? Rethinking the God-World Relationship with Teilhard de Chardin
Classical theology states that God freely creates, that is, God creates with no other motive than God's own desire and delight. God is in relationship with us but God does not depend on us. Teilhard de Chardin reflected on God's relationship to the world and concluded that God and world are in mutual relationship. God is not so much delighted by the world but dependent on the world for God's own fullness of life. We will explore Teilhard's insights with regard to the significance of the cosmic Christ, Christian life and the Church.
Ilia Delio, OSF, PhD, is a Franciscan Sister of Washington, DC, and an American theologian specializing in the area of science and religion, with interests in evolution, physics, and neuroscience and the import of these for theology.
Ilia currently holds the Josephine C. Connelly Endowed Chair in Theology at Villanova University and is the author of twenty books, including "Care for Creation" (coauthored with Keith Warner and Pamela Woods), which won two Catholic Press Book Awards in 2009: first place for social concerns and second place in spirituality. Her book "The Emergent Christ" won a third-place Catholic Press Book Award in 2011 for the area of Science and Religion. Her recent books include "The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love" (Orbis, 2013), which received the 2014 Silver Nautilus Book Award and a third-place Catholic Press Association Award for Faith and Science. Ilia holds two honorary doctorates, one from St. Francis University in 2015, and one from Sacred Heart University in 2020.