The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (2461 page)

BOOK: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions
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. With five Sikhs he was escorted to Delhi, where he chose torture and death rather than Islam or the performance of miracles. He symbolically appointed the absent Gobind R
i his successor.
On 11 Nov. 1675 he was beheaded on the site of the present
S
s
Gañj
gurdw
r
.
Teheran
(founding of as capital):
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre
(1881–1955).
French
Jesuit
palaeontologist and theologian. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1899 and was ordained in 1911. His theories on the origin and development of humanity, first privately circulated among his fellow Jesuits, but later published, attracted a good deal of attention, especially
The Phenomenon of Man
and
Le Milieu divin
. He argued that the stuff of which the universe is formed increases in complexity as it evolves, and likewise increases in consciousness. Humanity is one peak in this process, which moves through ever more closely knit social relationships and integration of consciousness towards the Omega Point. This, theologically, he identified with
Christ
. In 1962 the
Holy Office
gave a warning that his works had to be read with caution; they were never formally condemned.

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