February 2023 Blog

Spiritual Intelligence by Fraser Watts The apparently simple little adjective, “spiritual”, is more complicated than it looks, and there are significant issues about what it means. It is currently being used in a variety of contexts. I will focus mainly here on spiritual intelligence, but also briefly note parallel discussions about spiritual healing, and the spiritual turn. There is talk of “spiritual healing”, but what is “spiritual” about such healing? Some years ago Sarah Coakley and I jointly led a consultation on spiritual healing. In subsequent publications we have both grappled with how to conceptualise spiritual healing. In her recent book, Spiritual Healing: Science, Meaning and Disenchantment, Coakley makes a distinction between healing that is not strictly physical and healing that is framed in terms of God. In

By |2023-02-16T15:32:16+00:00February 15th, 2023|Categories: Blog|Tags: , , , , , , |
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January 2023 Blog

Science, Religion … and Literature by The Revd Canon Dr Michael Fuller   How do people engage with issues around science and religious belief? Readers of this blog will of course be familiar with the contours which the ‘science and religion debate’ have followed since Ian Barbour’s groundbreaking work in the 1960s: the search for philosophical, methodological and historical ‘bridges’ which might link these two areas of human activity, the focus on ‘hot topics’ like divine action and the mind-body problem, and so on. More recent developments have seen the extension of the field of science and religion studies to acknowledge non-Western religious traditions – and to acknowledge also the richly varied nature of the scientific enterprise. Science and religion are now rightly thought of as complex

By |2023-01-15T19:48:37+00:00January 15th, 2023|Categories: Blog|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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December 2022 Blog

Wentzel van Huyssteen (1942-2022) in memoriam Niels Henrik Gregersen, University of Copenhagen   The prominent member of ISSR, J. Wentzel van Huyssteen, sadly died February 18 this year, a few months before his 80th birthday. At the 2022 Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Denver, the ISSR arranged a session on “The Legacy of J Wentzel van Huyssteen: Commemoration and Critiques” on November 19 with panelists including Danie Veldsman, Nancy Howell, Kirk Wechter-McNelly, Andrew Rick-Miller, and myself.  The point of the session was to take stock of van Huyssteen’s work up from his early career to his mature work, epitomized in his Gifford Lectures, Alone in the World? From 2006. The session turned out to be moving by including also personal reflections from the panelists and

By |2022-12-15T22:33:14+00:00December 15th, 2022|Categories: Blog|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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November 2022 Blog

John Polkinghorne – a dear academic, theological and personal friend Michael Welker     In 1993 the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, under the leadership of Dan Hardy, sponsored a four-year consultation in which an interdisciplinary group of scholars (including the fields of cosmology, physics, biology, chemistry, environmental studies, philosophy, religious studies and theology) moved from an exchange via different disciplinary and individual academic approaches to the dialogue between science and theology. This is where John Polkinghorne and I met and first became intellectual friends and then, in the course of several years, also personal friends.   Together we developed international and interdisciplinary consultations and conferences, cooperated in the publication of articles and books, and even wrote one book together. John received the prestigious Von Humboldt Research

By |2022-11-15T22:01:15+00:00November 15th, 2022|Categories: Blog|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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September 2022 Blog Post

Feeling Science, Thinking Religion Donovan Schaefer On a warm autumn evening at St. Anne’s College, Oxford, a group of scientists, theologians, and philosophers sat down for a candle-lit dinner to discuss the relationship between science and religion. Our speaker was physicist Andrew Briggs, and his topic was “Theory in Science and Faith.” But instead of starting with God, Prof. Briggs began with science; and not science as an institution, as truth, or even as a set of ideas, but as an experience. “I confess,” he told us, “that my engagement with a scientific problem produces an extraordinary cycle of effects in me: until I have understood something to my satisfaction, or solved a problem—or even got an experiment to work—I go through a physical pain which can be

By |2022-09-15T21:07:04+01:00September 15th, 2022|Categories: Blog|Tags: , , , , , , , |
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The Contribution of Religion to Ethics by Michael J. Reiss

How should we decide what is morally right and what is morally wrong? For much of human history, the teachings of religion were presumed to be a large part of the answer. Over time, two developments challenged this. The first was the establishment of the discipline of moral philosophy. Foundational texts, such as Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, and the growth of coherent, non-religious approaches to ethics, notably utilitarianism, served to marginalise the role of religion. And then the twentieth century saw the rapid growth of evolutionary biology with an enthusiastic presumption that biology was the source of ethics. What space do such developments leave for religion in ethics?   One can be most confident about the validity and worth of an ethical conclusion if three

By |2019-05-03T19:11:38+01:00May 3rd, 2019|Categories: Blog|Tags: , , |
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ISSR 2019 Summer Conference Website and Call for Papers Now Live

Dear all, As the summer approaches, we are preparing for our 2019 summer conference which will be held from 21-24 July at the Eynsham Hall Hotel just outside of Oxford. This conference, which will be formed in part by the ISSR's Religion and the Social Brain research project, promises to be an engaging event both intellectually and socially. In preparation for the conference, we have launched a new website dedicated to ISSR conferences. On this website you will be able to read about the conference, location, as well as register, submit an abstract, and pay registration fees. We will be emailing out a formal Call for Papers in the coming days, but we wanted to ensure that you had an opportunity to visit the website and begin thinking

By |2019-04-25T17:41:29+01:00April 25th, 2019|Categories: ISSR Statements, News, Science & Religion News|Tags: , , , , , |
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