From an article (full version contains spoiler) on Bridge to Terabithia:

"In the book, a girl named Leslie Burke moves in next door to a
chore-ridden farm boy, Jess Aarons, and imagines for him a kingdom she
names Terabithia. Over a fall and winter, they ride the bus home from
school together (sharing a seat in spite of catcalls from schoolmates),
dump their backpacks at the edge of the road, and run across an empty
field to the edge of a creek bed, where 'someone long forgotten had
hung a rope.' They use the rope to swing across the gully into
Terabithia, a wooded glade that Leslie makes magic...."

Art by Wendell Minor from the cover
of Magic Time, by Doug Marlette

From Bridge to Terabithia:

"I know"-- she was getting excited-- "it could be a magic
country like Narnia, and the only way you can get in is by swinging
across on this enchanted rope." Her eyes were bright. She
grabbed the rope. "Come on," she said.

LOS ANGELES - Roger Cardinal Mahony, leader of the Los Angeles Catholic
Archdiocese, the nation's largest, apologized yesterday for what he
called a "terrible sin and crime" as the church confirmed it would pay
a record $660 million to people sexually abused by priests.

Log24 7/11, "Magic Time"-- Mary Karr, "Facing Altars:   Poetry and Prayer"-- "There is a body on the cross    in my church."

"Don't it always seem to go
that you don't know
what you've got
till it's gone"

-- Joni Mitchell

"The Archdiocese of Los Angeles agreed Saturday to a $660-million
settlement with 508 people who have accused priests of sexual abuse, by
far the biggest payout in the child molestation scandal that has rocked
the Roman Catholic Church nationwide....

The agreement will end all of the pending abuse litigation against the most populous archdiocese in the U.S....

Although the settlement will effectively end a chapter in the sad saga
of clerical abuse that has spanned decades, the resolution will come at
a huge cost to the church. More than $114 million has been promised in
previous settlements, bringing the total liability for clergy
misconduct in the Los Angeles Archdiocese to more than $774 million.
The figure dwarfs the next largest settlements in the U.S., including
those reached in Boston, at $157 million, and in Portland, Ore., at
$129 million."

-- Los Angeles Times, July 15, 2007

The August 2007 issue of Notices of the American Mathematical Society
contains tributes to the admirable personal qualities and mathematical
work of the late Harvard professor George Mackey.  For my own
tributes, see Log24 on March 17, 2006,  April 29, 2006, and March 10, 2007.  For an entry critical of Mackey's reductionism-- a philosophical, not mathematical, error-- see Log24 on May 23, 2007 ("Devil in the Details").

Here is another attack on reductionism, from a discussion of the work
of another first-rate mathematician, the late Gian-Carlo Rota of MIT:

"Another theme developed by Rota is that of 'Fundierung.' He shows that
throughout our experience we encounter things that exist only as
founded upon other things: a checkmate is founded upon moving certain
pieces of chess, which in turn are founded upon certain pieces of wood
or plastic. An insult is founded upon certain words being spoken, an
act of generosity is founded upon something's being handed over. In
perception, for example, the evidence that occurs to us goes beyond the
physical impact on our sensory organs even though it is founded upon
it; what we see is far more than meets the eye. Rota gives striking
examples to bring out this relationship of founding, which he takes as
a logical relationship, containing all the force of logical necessity.
His point is strongly antireductionist. Reductionism is the inclination
to see as 'real' only the foundation, the substrate of things (the
piece of wood in chess, the physical exchange in a social phenomenon,
and especially the brain as founding the mind) and to deny the true
existence of that which is founded. Rota's arguments against
reductionism, along with his colorful examples, are a marvelous
philosophical therapy for the debilitating illness of reductionism that
so pervades our culture and our educational systems, leading us to deny
things we all know to be true, such as the reality of choice, of
intelligence, of emotive insight, and spiritual understanding. He shows
that ontological reductionism and the prejudice for axiomatic systems
are both escapes from reality, attempts to substitute something
automatic, manageable, and packaged, something coercive, in place of
the human situation, which we all acknowledge by the way we live, even
as we deny it in our theories."

-- Robert Sokolowski, foreword to Rota's Indiscrete Thoughts

Father Robert Sokolowski Fr. Robert Sokolowski, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1962, he is internationally recognized and honored for his work in philosophy, particularly phenomenology. In 1994, Catholic University sponsored a conference on his work and published several papers and other essays under the title, The Truthful and the Good, Essays In Honor of Robert Sokolowski. -- Thomas Aquinas College newsletter

The tributes to Mackey are contained in the first of two feature articles in the August 2007 AMS Notices. 
The second feature article is a review of a new book by Douglas
Hofstadter.  For some remarks related to that article, see
Thursday's Log24 entry "Not Mathematics but Theology."

The August 2007 issue of Notices of the American Mathematical Society contains a review of a new book by Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop. (2007, Basic Books, New York. $26.95, 412 pages.)

A better review, in the Los Angeles Times of March 18, 2007, notes an important phrase in the book, "interpenetration of souls," that the AMS Notices review ignores.

Here is an Amazon.com search on "interpenetration" in the Hofstadter book:

The American
Mathematical Society editors and reviewer seem to share Hofstadter's
ignorance of Christian doctrine; they might otherwise have remembered a
rather famous remark: "This is not mathematics, it is theology."
 
For more on the theology of interpenetration, see Log24 on "Perichoresis, or Coinherence" (Jan. 22, 2004).

For a more mathematical approach to this topic, see Spirituality Today, Spring 1991:

"...
the most helpful image is perhaps the ellipse often used to surround
divine figures in ancient art, a geometrical figure resulting from the
overlapping, greater or lesser, of two independent circles, an interpenetration or coinherence which will, in some sense, reunify divided humanity, thus restoring to some imperfect degree the original image of God."

See also the trinitarian doctrine implicit in related Log24 entries of July 1, 2007, which include the following illustration of the geometrical figure described, in a somewhat confused manner, above:

"Values are rooted
in narrative."

-- Harvey Cox,    
Hollis Professor
of Divinity
at Harvard,
Atlantic Monthly,
  November 1995  

Related material:

Steps Toward Salvation:
An Examination of
Co-Inherence and
Substitution in
the Seven Novels
of Charles Williams,
by Dennis L. Weeks