"Are you related to the economist?” people sometimes ask when they see my surname. I explain that, yes, John Maynard Keynes is my great-great-uncle—his brother Geoffrey married Margaret Darwin, my great-grandmother. “So you’re related to Darwin too?” Yes, he’s my great-great-great grandfather. Eyes might fall on the cross around my neck: “And you’re a Christian?” Yes, a Catholic. “How does a Darwin end up Catholic?”[Hat tip to Dr. E. Echeverria]
The question genuinely seems to puzzle people. After all, Darwin ushered in a new era of doubt with his theory of evolution, and the Bloomsbury Group, of which Keynes was a part, influenced modern attitudes to feminism and sexuality. How can I be a product of this culture, and yet Catholic? The implication is that simple exposure to my ancestors’ life work should have shaken me out of my backwards error.
I’m a product of what Noel Annan called “the intellectual aristocracy”, the web of kinship uniting British intellectuals over the 18th to 20th centuries....
Sunday, September 01, 2013
Catholic descendant of Charles Darwin
From Ed West (Catholic Herald, UK, June 13, 2013) via Laura Keynes , "I’m a Direct Descendant of Darwin ... and a Catholic"
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Thjere was alerr in the Homiletic and Pastoral review many years ago. It was a copy ofa letetr Darwin wrote to his landlady. In it he bewailed how much his statement on evolution was misused and he wished he had never published it
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