Joost Opschoor writes about the recent Catalysing Postgraduate Ministry conference. On 15-17 March 2019, about ten invited delegations of academics, postgrads and postgraduate ministry leaders gathered in New College, Oxford for the first Catalysing Postgraduate Ministry conference organised by the Oxford Pastorate as a spin-off of the Developing a Christian Mind conference. Both conferences took Read more
Dr William Allchorn discusses the rise of right-wing extremism. The rise of right-wing extremism is never far from the headlines at present. The latest polling success by populist radical right parties in such diverse contexts as Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands in the past two years demonstrates a Read more
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