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0 Comments"Tolkien had taught him [C.S. Lewis] that the inability to believe in Christianity was primarily a failure of the imagination.” – A. N. Wilson, C.S. Lewis: A Biography.
Reading Groups Fall 2011
0 CommentsMacLaurinCSF Reading Groups are small discussion groups in which members read in conversation with each other. Groups form around a book or collection of essays/materials surrounding a specific topic. Please consider joining one of our fall discussions! Check out the offerings and if interested, fill out a Participant Form and send to Ruth Pszwaro.
Atheist Delusions and the Irrational Atheist
0 CommentsDavid Bentley Hart's Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies (Yale, 2009) and Vox Day's The Irrational Atheist: Dissecting the Unholy Trinity of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens (BenBella Books, 2008) are two very different books linked by a similar goal. Both authors assure us that their work is not intended to convince anyone that deism or theism, much less Christianity is true. Day even opens his book by declaring, provocatively, that he doesn’t care whether the reader goes to Hell or not! Instead, both authors simply are trying to correct popular but erroneous views of the history of Christianity and its cultural influence.
Scooby Doo Epistemology
1 CommentsMy two boys are enthusiastic fans of the Scooby-Doo cartoons. I have to admit, the shows are pretty fun, even if wildly predictable. A typical episode runs along the following lines: the gang is enjoying a tour of a newly opened amusement park, when a terrifying monster or ghost appears out of nowhere, causing all the patrons to run for the hills. But of course, our friends are too smart to be fooled by this trick, and so they begin their investigations. After some crazy shenanigans they eventually determine that the monster or ghost is really old Mr. Peabody, who previously owned the land that the park now sits on, and therefore wants to see it go bankrupt. And of course, he would have gotten away with it, if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids!
Christianity and the Arts: A Conversation
0 CommentsIn the last few years, a number of scholars have returned to the ancient question: What does it mean to be made in the image of a Creator-God? What is the significance of bearing the image of a God who did not simply put humankind on dry, desolate ground, but established them in a garden that anticipated an eschatological city, commissioning them to cultivate the earth?
Redeeming Singleness
0 CommentsRecent studies have shown that roughly half of adults in Western countries are unmarried, whether never-married, divorced, or widowed. The evangelical popular response has been to defend marriage or even to suggest that to remain single is in most cases against God’s will. Meanwhile, a new, more academic, response has been seeking to understand the meaning of Christian singleness through identifying underlying Christian assumptions and reassessing methods of reading related biblical texts.
The Path of Reason
1 CommentsEarly Christian intellectual life, according to Wilken, was dramatically different from Greek thought in that it reasoned not to God, but from God. Greek critics of Christian thought believed that the proper path of knowledge consisted in the ascent of the mind to eternal, transcendent realities.
