Mike Wagenman introduces a new series on scholarly disagreement.
How does a Christian scholar navigate scholarly disagreements? Over the years, I’ve endured my fair share of differences of opinion, perspective, and conviction with academic peers. Sometimes they have been friendly and fruitful but more often they have devolved into bitterness, bullying, and even personal attacks. And sometimes the worst offenders have been fellow Christians.
I attended an open-air service this weekend, at our local parish church. Our family has moved house recently and we haven't yet settled into a new church. But this open-air gathering seemed hugely appropriate right now, just after Easter.
It's almost a year since my last post for FiSch, on writing my acknowledgements to my recently completed thesis. Since then I've defended and finalised it: anyone who cares to can now download 100,000 words on 'Anchoritic Prayer in Time'! Since this is a pandemic year, of course, some things are still a little in limbo – I haven’t yet graduated, or formally deposited my thesis as a bound copy (which I was quite looking forward to doing!).
We enter Holy Week this year just a few days after the year-anniversary of the UK's first lockdown. What a difference a year makes. It's become a staple of the national conversation in recent weeks to observe the transformation in attitudes, plans and expectations from last March up to now, the way that the ongoing Covid-19 crisis has at different moments served to unify and divide, to trigger outpourings of love and of anger, to inspire creativity and provoke dread or despair.
This post is by Dr Timothy Kuiper, a postdoc in Zoology at the University of Oxford who studies elephant conservation in Zimbabwe.
Today I want to share a fascinating story of Christian celebration of biodiversity. In the highlands of Ethiopia, circular church buildings are surrounded by patches of the forest that once covered the landscape. Varying from less than a hectare up to thousands, these forests host a wide diversity of both animals and plants, and include individual trees hundreds of years old. But as farming has intensified, the church forests have been shrinking and their regeneration is threatened by cattle grazing.
We posted on the secularization of science last summer, in connection with Herman Dooyeweerd's essay of that title. Like me, you may have been surprised to learn that for Dooyweerd, the 'secularization of science' reached its culmination around the Renaissance, just as theology began to be marginalised in Western culture. This might seem to belittle the Christian faith and piety associated with subsequent scientific thinkers, from Copernicus and Galileo to Boyle and Faraday, for example. Isn't secularization a more modern phenomenon - perha
Mike Wagenman takes a timely look at the power of big tech in the context of public theology.
My post on Revelation and Science has raised quite a lot of interest. Even before I finished it I thought of some further important things to say, and further conversations with friends have revealed (if that's the word) other important points
Image: my laptop – I've been spending a lot of time here lately...