Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin ({{IPA|/pj?? teja? d? ?a?d??/}}; May 1, 1881 ? April 10, 1955), a Jesuit priest trained as a palaeontologist and a philosopher, was present at the discovery of Peking Man. Teilhard de Chardin popularized such ideas as the Omega Point and the Noosphere.

Teilhard in popular culture

• Teilhard de Chardin has been cited as the inspiration for Father Lankester Merrin, the character played by Max Von Sydow in the motion picture The Exorcist.
• Novelist Morris West clearly based the character David Telemond in The Shoes of the Fisherman on Teilhard.
• In Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos Paul Dure chooses Teilhard as his papal designation in homage to this man.
• Novelist Julian May references Teilhard's work in the novels in her Galactic Milieu series where it is the basis for the galactic conciousness that serves as the political and ethical background for the novels. The Galactic Milieu being an obvious reference to Teilhard's book Le Milieu Divin
• Former United States presidential candidate and former vice president Al Gore quoted Teilhard de Chardin in his 1992 book Earth in the Balance.
• Jean Houston, past president of the Association of Humanistic Psychology and former spiritual director to Hillary Clinton, culminates her book Life-Force: The Psycho-Historical Recovery of the Self (1980: 218-20) by recounting her extended encounter with Teilhard when she was 13 years old, which she further elaborates in her autobiography A Mythic Life: Learning to Live Our Greater Story (1996: 142-48).
• Walter J. Ong, S.J. (1912-2003), the American cultural historian and spiritual writer, was one of the first to call Teilhard's thought regarding the noosphere to the attention of his fellow American Catholics, and Ong never tired of referring to Teilhard's evolutionary thought. See Walter J. Ong, "The Mechanical Bride: Christen the Folklore of Industrial Man," Social Order 2.2 (1952): 79-85, esp. 84; Frontiers in American Catholicism (1957); American Catholic Crossroads (1959); The Barbarian Within (1962); In the Human Grain (1967); The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (1967), Ong's 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University; Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology (1971); Interfaces of the Word (1977); Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (1981), Ong's 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University; and Hopkins, the Self, and God (1986), Ong's 1981 Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto; Faith and Contexts, 4 vols. (1992-1999).
• Teilhard de Chardin has been alleged by some commentators to have been a participant in the Piltdown Man hoax, but the allegation of Teilhard's participation in this has been discredited.