Sanctifying Reason: Isaac Watts as Enlightenment Hymn-Writer Dr Graham Beynon on Friday, October 9th at 7:30pm BST (2:30pm EDT) The Enlightenment extolled the role of reason but where did that leave the Christian faith? Isaac Watts responded to this challenge defending a faith that was both reasonable and above reason. We will examine his arguments and how they appear most famously in his hymns. Sign up here...
A Costly Silence: Northern Ireland, the Church and the Culture of Abortion a Conversation with Dawn McAvoy and Philippa Taylor on Friday, 7th of August, 8pm BST (3pm EDT) Until this Spring, Northern Ireland was the safest place in the UK for unborn children. Its life-affirming laws and culture have ensured that over 100,000 people are now alive who otherwise would not be. This tradition of protecting life has now been upended by a Westminster parliament determined to foist radical abortion law on the province. This webinar will tell the story of this unprecedented policy intervention and the deeper cultural changes which have made it possible. In conversation with Dawn McAvoy (Both Lives Matter) and Philippa Taylor (CARE), we’ll trace how the culture of abortion became normative in the UK, ask where the Church has been as the rights of the weakest have been undermined, and explore how the Christian faith equips us to think and act at such a time as this. Book your free place here...
a Discussion with Dr. Christopher Watkin and Kevin Moss on Tuesday, 19th of May, 8pm BST (GMT+1). What does it mean to live well during a global pandemic? What resources – intellectual and spiritual – can we rely on at such a time? Join Dr Christopher Watkin (Senior Lecturer, French Studies, Monash University) and Kevin Moss (PhD Candidate in Intellectual History) as they discuss what we can learn from Camus's seminal work, The Plague, and from the Christian tradition about pandemic prudence. Book your free place here ...
Best known for his seven-book series, the Chronicles of Narnia, C. S. Lewis was a scholar and writer of exceptional ability. Today, however, the scale and variety of his contributions to literature and thought are often obscured. Dr Jacqueline Glenny will introduce us afresh to a man and a mind of enduring influence who had a deep connection to Cambridge. Reserve your free tickets on Eventbrite...
'Ye shall be as gods'. The temptation of self-deification is as old as the book of Genesis. Much newer is the staggering array of powerful technologies we can enlist to realise our dreams of 'improving' and redefining the human person, from genetic therapy to AI. In this talk, Andrew Fellows takes us to the fundamentally religious core of transhumanism and asks some hard questions of our newfound techno-religiosity. [button size='small' style='' text='Reserve your free tickets on Eventbrite' icon='' icon_color='' link='https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/transhumanism-ai-and-the-future-of-humanity-tickets-88853622577' target='_self' color='' hover_color='' border_color='' hover_border_color='' background_color='' hover_background_color='' font_style='' font_weight='' text_align='' margin='']...
Why might aesthetics be integral to our quest for knowledge? In this talk, Matthew Peckham (Rock Baptist Church, Cambridge) will argue that reconsidering aesthetics from an epistemological perspective reshapes our understanding of both disciplines. From a Christian perspective, this involves the cultivation of orthopathos (or 'right feeling'), and a re-appraisal of the character of knowledge itself. [button size='small' style='' text='Reserve your free tickets on Eventbrite' icon='' icon_color='' link='https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/aesthetics-and-the-knowledge-of-god-tickets-88841319779' target='_self' color='' hover_color='' border_color='' hover_border_color='' background_color='' hover_background_color='' font_style='' font_weight='' text_align='' margin='']...
Forming a Christian Mind (FACM) equips postgraduate students, post-docs and early career academics for their double calling: to study excellently from the basis of a biblical worldview (November conference), and to use what they study for cultural apologetics and mission (February conference). Christian Heritage is excited to be a sponsor of these conferences, which will help Christians in the academic world to recognise and pursue these two goals with the support of other Christians, in order to grow in confidence and fruitfulness within their disciplines. For more information, please visit the FACM website. Reserve your free ticket...
Modernization – leaving the village for the cities; industrialization; working outside the home rather than in it; individualism and the severing of community ties – has been the defining human experience of the past two and a half centuries. This has had profound consequences for our sense of identity, and has opened the door to the rise of modern ideologies: secular metanarratives that claim meta-explanatory powers. It has also transformed what the past means for ordinary people – with consequences for how we view the present and the future. This lecture will explore some of the more important challenges this presents for a coherent, Christian view of the world, and of ourselves. Reserve your free ticket...
The Round Church is one of Cambridge's oldest and best-known buildings. It predates the University by almost a century. It is one of only four round churches still standing in the UK. It has been much loved and discussed by poets, preachers, antiquarians, and journalists down the centuries. And yet so much about its past remains a mystery. Debunking some popular stories about wandering Knights Templar, this talk, in the beautiful setting of the Round Church itself, will uncover the far more fascinating truths that lay behind this amazing building. It will look at the foundation of the church in the early decades of the twelfth century and some of the ideas which led its founders to make it round. This is a great opportunity to enter the world of the early middle ages and also to find out more about life in Cambridge a century before the first students arrived. Reserve your free ticket...
In sharing the gospel, we sometimes forget that the message of sin against a holy God is totally implausible to many people today. As the reality of sin is integral to the meaning of the gospel of forgiveness, we are required to make sense of it. While exploring the barriers to accepting sin, this talk looks at how we can expose its reality. Reserve your free ticket...