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…
The International Federation of Evangelical Students (IFES) is a truly cosmopolitan community. When its member organisations meet every four years, delegates come from up to 150 countries. This year’s World Assembly is currently taking place in Mexico, and its highlights include the welcoming into membership of evangelical student groups in Greece, South Sudan and Read more…
I started applying for PhD projects mainly because I didn’t want to abandon ideas I’d been developing during my earlier studies. I had a blue-sky, rose-tinted, starry-eyed view of academic research. In my final undergraduate exams I may have lost precious marks by trying to work out my own odd Read more…
I’m excited to tell you about a FiSch research project. The Faith-in-Scholarship Working Group on Ecosystem Services (FiSWES) draws together fourteen Christian thinkers (mostly academics) to explore new perspectives on a specific problem. We’ve already had two meetings in Leeds this year, with a third one planned. Ecosystem services (ES) Read more…
I’m struck by the richness of St Luke’s account of the first Easter. I always find it fascinating how the Gospel writers juxtapose the elements of their accounts, especially Luke: how one episode sheds light on the next once I ignore the chapter breaks. And the passion narratives are especially Read more…
Last week I had the privilege of several coffee breaks with Christian friends doing PhDs in different areas. Each time I came away excited by a fresh glimpse of how big God’s world is. One friend is doing a PhD on a certain grammatical obstacle for Kurdish speakers learning English, Read more…
The following is my summary of a sermon preached by Tom Wright in the chapel of St John’s College, Cambridge some years ago. As an undergraduate, I was gripped and inspired by this vision for my calling as a student. The main text was Revelation 5 [1], and there were also Read more…