Economics is the subject I most wish I had studied earlier than I did. Although my school offered an A-level in the subject, a motivation to understand money and its growth and disappearance only arose very gradually over the following years, as I grappled increasingly with my own finances at Read more…
Maybe you’ve wondered this too: how does my faith relate to my scholarship? It might be easy to affirm with the Apostle Paul that “in him [Christ] all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17, NIV). But too often, the assumptions in Western twenty-first century culture about what counts as a fact Read more…
The research postdoc I’ve been carrying out in Toronto this year has enabled me to start a new project – one which has made explaining my work to friends, especially Christian friends, a little more unpredictable. When I was working on my DPhil, I could answer people’s questions at church Read more…
Christopher Watkin’s new book, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture, is receiving significant attention. I see it mentioned regularly in blog posts (like this one), email newsletters, and at academic and ministry conferences. With a Foreword by the late Timothy Keller, it’s Read more…
Last week, the most recent Postgrad Initiative email was sent out which introduced the idea of “Cultural Apologetics for Academia.” “Cultural apologetics” as opposed to traditional apologetics was framed as “showing how academics in all disciplines can introduce the gospel in a winsome way.” This quote from Collin Hansen was included in Read more…
It was at the start of this year that Ruth Perry, the headteacher of a primary school in Reading, took her own life after being informed that the school she led (and attended as a child) would be downgraded by Ofsted from “outstanding” to “inadequate”. This story, tragic on many Read more…
My dear postgrad friends, We are quickly approaching the end of this academic year, according to our secular educational calendars. In our church calendar, we’ve just celebrated the cosmos-redeeming feast of Easter. And now we also come to this final installment of our reflections this year on the relationship between Read more…
Image: AI-generated by DALL-E* I had a chat with a robot the other evening. The OpenAI project has released an interface called ChatGPT, so I decided to do some research on artificial intelligence by consulting the authority at my fingertips: an AI dialogue partner. I asked it what progress there Read more…
Dear Toby/i, I’ve been thinking about the off-hand comment you made in our seminar last week – when you exclaimed (I think, in frustration with how personally challenging you’re finding the material we were discussing) that your beloved subject matter has become far more complex and nuanced than you ever Read more…
Sad news emerged last week about Tom McLeish, professor of natural philosophy at the University of York and longstanding associate of Thinking Faith Network. Tom passed away on 27 February aged 60, leaving an amazing legacy of scholarship in understanding the physics of soft matter and of proteins in living Read more…