Two of the speakers from last May’s McDonald Centre conference, Christianity and the Flourishing of Universities, have been hard at work on a project that addresses some of the same themes.
Led by Mike Higton and David Ford from the University of Cambridge, the study asks, “What place does religion have in the Western research university?” Visit their website, The Idea of a University, for resources or to join the discussion.
On Friday, 5 October, John Perry will speak in the University of Cambridge at the third annual Balzan-Skinner Colloquium. A keynote lecture, which provides the focus for the day, will be given by Tim Stanton, of York University, entitled The Fable of Liberalism.
Perry’s paper will be Liberalism and the Birth of Public Reason. Other participants include Sarah Mortimer, Mark Goldie, Jeffrey Collins, and Ian Harris.
For full details, visit the website of Cambridge’s Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities.
Next month, Nigel Biggar will speak at the University of Chicago as part of a conference on Theological Reflection and The Limits of Politics. Other speakers include Robin Lovin, a member of the McDonald Centre advisory board, Lisa Sowle Cahill, Eric Gregory, Charles Mathewes, Gilbert Meilander, and Jean Bethke Elshtain (also a member of our advisory board).
The conference is free to attend; full details are available from the University of Chicago Divinity School.
Videos of Nigel Biggar’s presentations at the Mayo Clinic are now available online.
The first is a lecture on the topic, Why Religion Deserves a Place in Secular Medicine.
The second is on euthanasia and is entitled, Should Doctors Ever Kill? The events were sponsored by the Veritas Forum and full details are available here.
A complete video archive of the recent McDonald Centre conference, Christianity and the Flourishing of Universities, is now available. All six sessions are online, and the conference programme can be downloaded to help you follow along.
In addition, we are pleased to share a newspaper article about the conference from Nederlands Dagblad, a Dutch daily newspaper. In it, Dr. G.C. den Hertog discusses the way in which two of the conference’s presenters, Nigel Biggar and David Hempton, addressed the question of the soul of the university, which had been posed by Miroslav Volf. Biggar and Hempton do so by rejecting the picture of the academic ivory tower as theologically inappropriate. Hertog suggests that universities in the Netherlands ought to ask themselves Volf’s pointed question of how theology can recommend itself to the university if it portrays God as a religious therapist and butler, and that universities in the rest of the world might have something to learn from the Dutch statesman and theologian, Abraham Kuyper.
Last week, the McDonald Centre was honoured to host one of its most exciting events. Eleven leading scholars from top universities in the US and UK gathered to study the recent plight of universities.
It was the first time that these scholars, all of whom have been supported in various projects by the McDonald Agape Foundation, were together at a single event. They represent the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Duke, Notre Dame, Yale, Chicago, and Emory.
The conference, entitled Christianity and the Flourishing of Universities, explored a variety of questions, including:
This was the fifth major McDonald Centre conference, with previous events on justice, forgiveness, human enhancement technologies, and and an engagement with the work of Peter Singer. This year’s conference was attended by well over 100 scholars, students, clergy, and laity from across the UK and numerous other countries.
Videos of all conference sessions are now available.
L-R: Peter McDonald, Nigel Biggar, Nicholas Wolterstorff, John Witte, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Al McDonald, Paul Griffiths, Suzie McDonald, Miroslav Volf, David Ford, Sarah Coakley, Richard Hays, David Hempton, Mark Noll. Photo: Ralph Williamson.
On Thursday, 17 May, Nigel Biggar will participate in a panel discussion on the role played by religion in war and peace. It will be chaired by Professor Jennifer Welsh and will also include Tony Coady and Rama Mani. The event has been organized by the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law & Armed Conflict. It will be held in the Manor Road Building, Seminar Room A, University of Oxford and begins at 12.30pm. This event has now concluded and an audio podcast is available from the ELAC website.
