Staying strong in the rain

摘要

The relationship between faith, science and nature could hardly be worse than it is now. On the one hand, evangelical ideologues, drawing on an ersatz faith-based theory called "intelligent design", are eager to wrench back the hands of the scientific clock. On the other, polemical books by the "new atheists" -Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and so on - have thrown down the secular gauntlet, challenging believers' fundamental tenets. So what has the verse above to do with all this? The lines come from a poem, the preface to Spring and Ashura, by Kenji Miyazawa, who was to become one of Japan's most popular 20th-century poets.