Upcoming Events

July 2021

17 Jul

Johann Georg Hamann is the key Enlightenment thinker that you don't generally get to hear about. He had critiqued Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason before that seminal work was even published. He analysed the key, self-defeating weaknesses in Moses Mendelssohn's capitulation to a secular worldview, and predicted the danger that this would lead to for the Jewish people in Germany. He was admired by Goethe, Schelling, Schlegel, and Kierkegaard, and was a significant inspiration to that great man's philosophical work. In this webinar, Dr John Betz (University of Notre Dame) talks about how Hamann is a great example of how Christians engage thoughtfully with culture, and asks whether he could be a model for us as we seek to be salt and light in a collapsing society.   ...

09 Jul

Joshua Kellard is Outreach Coordinator at Christian Heritage, Cambridge.  The most important questions about the University are ethical: those that include words like ‘ought’, ‘should’ and ‘must’. What ought the University to be? What kinds of good should it pursue? Which beliefs must we hold in order to ground these goods in something more than whim? What we say about good and evil, about the purpose and meaning of human activity, dictates what we are able to say about the mission of the University.  While this is a basic point, it is surprising how often it is ignored in discussions of higher education. It is far easier to talk about the University in the pre-packaged terms of the culture wars, or make vague appeals to ‘human flourishing’ than it is to explain what the University should be for, and why. Big questions like these have a tendency to take us to the very roots of our worldview, and therefore into uncomfortable territory. I suspect that is why the question of ethics is usually kept at a safe distance from discussions of higher education. In philosophical terms, there is always the danger that dealing with ethics might force us to confront our metaphysics...