I just spent five glorious days in Colorado Springs, CO, at our annual (but my first) Summer Seminar on Intelligent Design. The setting was idyllic — towers of red rock and ponderous pines against the bluest of skies, and numberless birds, butterflies, and other critters large and small, from deer to bobcats to garter snakes (I caught a cute one). But as much as I reveled in the beauty of the natural world, I would have been nearly as happy in a basement, given the company! 

For unnumbered hours we basked in the shared light of the pursuit of truth through good science and sound philosophy. Scientists and philosophers long established in the ID movement came to teach and others came to learn, but collegiality reigned with the happy result that roles often reversed. Teachers became students and students found new voices, new colleagues, and new career paths. Where we agreed with each other we found support and resonance, and where we disagreed we found the harmony that requires difference but makes music all the same. 

We ascended to lofty intellectual heights and we interrogated the depths of nature; we spoke of quanta and qualia, cosmology and capsids, fossils and fermions, mice, and men, and the molecules that make them. It was a week of deep communion.