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25 Oct

Part II of Andrew Fellows' Fall talk series.   The German philosopher Nietzsche predicted that the ‘death of God’ would lead to a culture of emptiness. That has transpired and our voided age needs God. But which God? In this lecture series Andrew Fellows argues that the antidote is a deep engagement with the true and living God and that He alone is the way back to reality, stability, and true happiness.   The nature of who God is means that He is always true to Himself. Contrary to what we believe, this is simply not possible for humans. In this lecture we see that humans only become who they were meant to be in relation to the One who is the great 'I AM'.   ...

18 Oct

Part I of Andrew Fellows' Fall talk series.   The German philosopher Nietzsche predicted that the ‘death of God’ would lead to a culture of emptiness. That has transpired and our voided age needs God. But which God? In this lecture series Andrew Fellows argues that the antidote is a deep engagement with the true and living God and that He alone is the way back to reality, stability, and true happiness.   While the modern outlook reduces everything to some version of a monistic oneness, Christianity holds out a vision of two distinct orders of being. One is the unique life of God, and the other is creation. In this lecture, we see how grasping this distinction is the key to understanding reality rightly.   ...

11 Aug

Joshua Kellard, Outreach Coordinator at Christian Heritage, continues our series on the University.  Discussions of the mission of the University are always ethical in character: they are concerned with how we ought to live. Specifically, they are concerned with what we ought to do, and why, in the context of higher education. What are the proper goals of the University? What is it for?  The Magna Charta Universitatum documents claim that the University has a universal and rational mission. But if we wish to maintain this, we will need an ethical framework which can justify the University’s activities, showing them to be good. But the fact remains that not every worldview is able to ground the University’s mission in moral reality. In the last post, we saw that secular humanism, committed to the idea of an uncaused and amoral universe, struggles to ground any moral values which are universally valid. It is just not clear how the humanist can move from a description of things that are, to a prescription of how things ought to be. If human beings are the source of all moral values, then ethics will be as changeable and relative as we are. One implication of this worldview-enforced...

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.   ...

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, and he was admired by Goethe, Schelling, Schlegel, and Kierkegaard.   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...

23 Jun

Joshua Kellard is Outreach Coordinator at Christian Heritage, Cambridge. A ceremony described as ‘once in a generation’ took place last week, as university officials from across the world gathered virtually on June 16th to celebrate the signing of the Magna Charta Universitatum 2020. The document reaffirms and develops a 1988 charter of the same name, and aims to declare what universities are, what they should stand for, and how they should operate in our 21st century. It is an ambitious statement, and should give pause to those of us who believed the days of global declarations to have reluctantly given way to institutional emojism and hashtaggery. Video may have killed the radio star, but it would seem that the draw of the ‘Big Charter’ lives on.  To anyone interested in universities, the declaration, and its predecessor, repays a close reading. In this post, my concern will be to introduce the two documents and their key ideas, before probing some of the assumptions behind them in the second, and then going on to provide a short response from a Christian perspective in the final instalment.  The Background The 1988 Magna Charta Universitatum was written to coincide with the 900th anniversary of Europe’s oldest University, that of...

19 Jun

In his new book, The Return of the God Hypothesis, Dr Stephen Meyer sheds light on three scientific discoveries which he believes point to an Intelligent Designer. In this second Moot Point event, Dr James Croft, a philosopher and humanist, interacts with Dr Meyer, discussing the case for and against design in the Universe.   ...

12 Jun

We tend to think that bringing a child into the world is a good thing – something to be celebrated, in fact. This assumption is challenged by antinatalism, an ethical stance which argues that procreation is in itself morally wrong, and should therefore be abandoned. In this Moot Point event, Professor David Benatar interacts with Christian ethicist Dr Matthew Lee Anderson, discussing the arguments for and against antinatalism.   ...

24 May

If Christians sometimes fall short of practising discerning cultural engagement, Dr Chris Watkin argues that it is because they have wandered away from the nature and teaching of the Christian Scriptures. In this webinar, Chris explores how the Bible embodies and encourages cultural engagement of the broadest and most penetrating sort, revealing how we can become wise cultural critics.   ...