“A scientist is a person who knows more and more about less and less,” goes the saying [1], “until he knows everything about nothing.” There were times during my PhD studies when I took heart from the first part of that quip, and times when the second half seemed all too Read more
Thinking Faith Network is the parent of Faith-in-Scholarship. The organisation that runs FiSch is a 30-year-old UK-based charity committed to helping people explore how imaginative Christian thinking can transform and enrich every area of life. For a multimedia introduction, the promotional video released on 9 April is now available on YouTube. For Read more
Our series “What is good scholarship?” has examined nine aspects* of God’s created order in which we can discern norms – different kinds of “goods”. We believe these norms are recognised to varying degrees by everyone, thanks to God’s grace. At the same time, Christians know that pursuit of goodness Read more
In this post I want to show how faith lies at the heart of scholarship – perhaps in some ways that we hadn’t thought of before. I also want to explain why faith comes as the final virtue in our series ‘What is good scholarship?’ Faith is a scholarly virtue Read more
Chris Watkin, Senior Lecturer in French Studies at Monash University, Australia, recalls the origins of CHAS: The Cambridge CHAS group (Christians in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences) began in 2008 as an occasional and informal gathering of postgraduate students with a common interest in exploring what it means to Read more
Cambridge has long been a stimulating home for Christian minds. Devout doctors, monks and other medieval scholars helped birth the world-famous university in 1209, key figures in the English Reformation studied, taught and preached in the town, and God-fearing pioneers in many disciplines have been nurtured in the colleges, departments Read more
Our series on “good scholarship” has so far considered the logical and lingual aspects of reality. Here I want to explore a particular kind of offence against principles of both logical distinction and lingual clarification. Category errors arise when things are referred to in ways that imply they belong to a category of things Read more
Is academic work a kind of perfectionism? Single-minded focus certainly goes a long way in scholarship. But we must also be circumspect, not forgetting the constraints on our time and resources, our health and the need to make concessions to our audiences when communicating discoveries. All-round perfection will be an Read more
The Faith-in-Scholarship working group on ecosystem services is starting to have an impact! Twelve of us started meeting back in February to work on a challenge in conservation science (read about the basic rationale). Now we’ve presented some of our work at an ecological conference in Rome and are working on Read more
Towards the end of my undergraduate degree, I encountered a group of students meeting to discuss why Christian faith no longer seems to affect our culture as much as it did in the past. The ‘Big Picture Group’, as it was called, excited me by its sweeping worldview and its candid Read more