Richard Russell looks at the way scientific knowledge grows out of its philosophical and religious roots. What is the relation between religion (in the sense of ultimate commitments) and the academic disciplines? Frequently any positive relationship is denied. The sciences claim to have become autonomous (a law to themselves) with respect to philosophy, Read more…
Guest blogger Audrey Southgate reflects on lessons drawn from studying a morally problematic figure. Some view the past as a shackle from which the present must free itself. By contrast, I grew up delighted by the stories that linked the present with the past. At church, at home, and at Read more…
Andi Wang considers how academic modes of thinking interact with knowing through faith. I have always loved solving problems. Even as a four-year-old child in primary school, apparently my teacher once remarked to my parents that I was a “deep thinker”. Throughout my schooling I was naturally drawn to mathematics, Read more…
Bruce Wearne encourages students to reflect upon institutional relationships in academic life and the effect of higher education reform. I first developed the above diagram as a part of my response to what was happening at Chisholm Institute of Technology (CIT) in Melbourne back in the 1980s. CIT was part Read more…
Tom Ingleby (above, left of centre) reflects on the workshops he attended at Church Scientific in Leeds Could a Christian worldview enhance science? This was the rather controversial question which sat behind the Church Scientific project. The claim is that if Jesus is Lord of all things and the one in whom all wisdom Read more…
Richard Vytniorgu completes his survey of the transactional approach to science. In my previous post I explored the dynamics of the transactional view of reality and how this relates to scientific inquiry. In this post, I want to draw out some implications of the transactional view – to see transactional inquiry as Read more…
Richard Vytniorgu continues his series on the transactional view of scientific development. In my first post exploring the transactional approach to science, I explained how twentieth-century transactional philosophy developed out of dissatisfaction with a Newtonian understanding of human existence and inquiry. Human beings don’t stand apart from their environment or their inquiry; humans Read more…
Richard Vytniorgu introduces a way of thinking about scientific work by rooting it in its social context. This is the first in a series of three posts in which I introduce the transactional approach to doing science – an approach which encourages us to position scientific work within a broader matrix of beliefs Read more…
Rudi Hayward completes his review of “Tracing the Lines: Spiritual Exercise and the Gesture of Christian Scholarship” by Robert Sweetman (Wipf & Stock 2016). The first part of this review ended with the paradox that either Christian scholarship is understood as so integrally Christian as to endanger the sense in which the Christian and non-Christian are engaged Read more…
Rudi Hayward reviews Tracing the Lines: Spiritual Exercise and the Gesture of Christian Scholarship by Robert Sweetman (Wipf & Stock 2016, 177 pages) With this book Sweetman wants to participate in, and take forward, a conversation about the meaning and possibility of Christian scholarship. His starting point is that being Christ-followers should mark our life Read more…