A while ago I summarised a talk Andrew Fellows gave at this year’s Transforming the Mind conference. He called on us to further the purposes of Christ’s kingdom in our universities. In his second talk, Andrew focused on the relationship between faith and reason, and how this has been viewed in the church over the past 2000 years.
Have you heard about Ivan the Terrible? He was a delightful Russian king. Did you know that he secretly worshipped Cronus aka Saturn - the god who ate his own children? Ivan shows us clearly that you become like the god you follow. Ivan tortured and murdered thousands of his own people. His life was drenched in innocent blood. Can you imagine what would have happened if Ivan had followed Jesus instead of Cronus?
I’ve just come to the end of the second official week of my DPhil. In between all the library inductions, research workshops, and meeting new people, I’ve been doing some thinking about where I want my research to go: the kind of questions I want to ask, and work towards answering, about medieval recluses’ prayer.
A guest post from Dr Xia Zhu.
At creation, the mandate that God gave to humanity was for people to reflect and mirror God’s stewardship… This involves far more than religious enterprises or the church. It has to do with how we engage with scientific endeavours, how we do business, how we treat each other, how we treat animals, and how we treat the environment.
Sproul, R. C. (2016), How Should I Think about Money? Reformation Trust Publishing, p23
A new space for students and researchers to grow their scientific thinking is about to appear in Leeds. Church Scientific is a project to nurture scientific thinkers in building a holistic understanding of how our insights about the world originate and develop through imagination, theory-building and experimentation. The project concerns all kinds of pure and applied sciences: not just the “natural” sciences.
So you don't believe in God (Psalm 14:1)? Does that mean you are a materialist then? I used to believe that malarkey but it made me so miserable and grumpy. I thought about it and realised that if everything I do is programmed by hidden physical stuff then murdering my wife and kids is not my fault and even plotting to kill them is not my fault. Both my thoughts and my actions are beyond my control. What a nightmare for my family!
Last Saturday Faith-in-Scholarship hosted a workshop about Christian philosophy with Dr Jeremy Ive. Having asked what “Christian philosophy” might be, I’m now going to share the basics of a proposal concerning the structure of our experience. For now this framework is presented in Jeremy’s thesis awaiting publication… so remember, you heard it here first!