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
This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. … Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 1 John 4:9,11 We return to our series on good scholarship Read more
The fact that Christians put a strong emphasis on justice is nothing new. At my church we’re currently working through Amos in our home groups. Amos surveys the surrounding lands and finds great injustices occurring there. He notices that injustices are occurring in (i) the law courts (Amos 2:6), (ii) Read more
What role does the aesthetic aspect of reality play in everyday life? As a musician, this question is obviously close to my heart. Herman Dooyeweerd identifies the intellectual virtue associated with the aesthetic as ‘harmony’, while Calvin Seerveld, an thinker in the same tradition who wrote extensively on art, prefers ‘nuance’ Read more
Please help us to measure the value of this research output! You can demonstrate quantifiable public benefit and impact by liking or sharing this blog post on social media. On a scale of 1 to 10, how transformative has it been in terms of changed attitudes or behaviour? If you would Read more
Q: Why did the social scientist talk to her colleague?A: To reveal her ontological security OK, the one about a broken drum being the best Christmas present is a better cracker joke – in fact you just can’t beat it. However, like many jokers our social scientist does reveal something Read more
Continuing our series on values for scholarship, David Hanson looks at God’s calling for humans to innovate. Scholarship is subject to cultural-formative norms. Humans never fabricate ex nihilo – only God does that. Yet the bringing of ‘new things’ into existence reflects God’s creative power in our calling to stewardly dominion of the world. Cooking a 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
Have you ever thought of clarity as a virtue? In the last post, Roy Clouser started our series on intellectual virtues by explaining the importance of the ‘logical’ or ‘analytical’ aspect of reality for scholarship. Clarity is a norm (a kind of goodness) that presupposes the norm of distinguishing logically; Read more