By happenstance I ran across Arthur Peacocke’s wikipedia article which, to my dismay, intimated that he had died on October 21st of this year. The news confirmed it.

You may be wondering who the Rev. Dr. Arthur Peacocke was, and with good reason. I have never really heard his name outside of selective circles. I myself only ran across him in my research on divine action (God’s interaction with the world). Peacocke’s particular view is described as a kind of “top-down” or “whole-part” causation in which God is the mind and the world is the body, but God is totally transcendant and immanent in a way that is contrary with how the “I” does not transcend the human body ontologically. (read more here.)

Peacocke did much for the proposal that evolution and theistic belief not necessarily be at odds with each other. This is evident in books such as Evolution: The Disguised Friend of Faith?, Creation and the World of Science: The Re-Shaping of Belief, and Theology for a Scientific Age: Being and Becoming-Natural, Divine and Human. Incidentally, Peacocke was also an ordained priest in the Church of England, a founding member of The International Society for Science and Religion, the founder of The Society of Ordained Scientists, and a council member of The European Society for the Study of Science And Theology. He was also awarded the Templeton Prize (795,000 GBP or approx. 1.4 million US dollars in 2006) for Progress in Religion, which he mostly donated to the Ian Ramsey Centre at Oxford (which he founded). Other recipients have been Mother Theresa, Billy Graham, Bill Bright, and Chuck Colson. Interestingly, the award is adjusted so it exceeds the Nobel Prize.

God’s peace be with you, Arthur.

I imagine everyone reading this is familiar with those “life checklists,” those lists of things you want to do in your life. Whether written down or merely stuck up in your head, I imagine everyone has them. Be it “learn Japanese,” or “eat a grasshopper,” we all have those things that we either want to do once, or make it an ingrained habit to do them. Personally, I’m trying to read more generally, read more poetry, and bring my life into some semblance of order (it’s going slow).

I’ve also really wanted to go see the local symphony perform. I haven’t always desired to do this, but it’s been on my mind for a couple years, especially since I’ve become enraptured with Mozart. There’s just something about his work that gets to me; moreso even than other classical composers. I don’t know what it is. Last year I believe they performed his Mass in C Minor (which is astounding) and my roommate and I had talked about going but never did.

This year they had Mozart’s Requiem on the bill, and we just couldn’t pass it up. Season tickets in hand, we headed downtown to the Kansas City Lyric Theater, got our seats, and experienced something that I daresay everyone should attempt to at least once in their life. It helps that the Requiem is my absolute favorite piece by Mozart. I suppose I might not have been so happy with a piece I was less familiar with (understanding the Latin pays off), but still, it would probably be worth it. The sound was incredible, and deeply moving.

Read more »

As I said a few posts ago, I’ve been reading (ever so slowly) through Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. The book really is excellent, and I recommend it to anyone who wants to get a grasp on why Christian Thought is the way it is today. In this post I want to highlight one of Noll’s better strengths: charting the changes in the Christian mind through history.

He does this in several ways in the book, each delineated in its own chapter: the university, American culture, politics, science, etc. He points to the shifts and changes through time that show the effects that the deficiency in Christian thinking has had on each institution. At the end of the chapter on the “Intellectual Disaster of Fundamentalism” Noll makes an aside that I just found too interesting to pass up.

The rest follows after the jump.

Read more »