Archived GFCF Lectures:

1991-2003 || 03-04 || 04-05 || 05-06 || 06-07 || 07-08 || 08-09 ||

09-10 || 10-11

Note: For some lectures, there is no audio-file available. We can provide the lecture on Audio-CD as well. Please contact Guillaume Badinier.

Dr. Ralph C. Wood, Professor of Theology and Literature, Baylor University

Wednesday, September 23, 4:00-5:30 PM, Woodward Room 5

Dostoevsky's 'The Brothers Karamazov' as the premier novel of the Modern World

ABSTRACT
The literary critic Harold Bloom once defined a classic as a book that requires us permanently to rearrange the furniture of our lives. He meant, I suspect, that such a text prevents us from viewing the world through conventional lenses; it requires us not only to see the world with cleansed vision but also to reorder our lives accordingly. T. S. Eliot defined literary greatness in similar terms. “The majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human passions: Dante’s [Divine Comedy] is one of those [texts] which one can only just hope to grow up to at the end of life.” Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov is another. I suspect that it has caused more readers of various types and commitments to redefine themselves both morally and spiritually than has any other book, excepting only Dante’s.

BIOGRAPHY
Ralph C. Wood is Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chicago. From 1971-97 he taught on the faculty of Wake Forest University, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he was the John Allen Easley Professor of Religion. At Baylor, he teaches in the Great Texts program as well as in the departments of Religion and English. He serves as an editor-at-large for the Christian Century and as a member of the editorial board of the Flannery O'Connor Review. He won the Jon Reinhardt Award for Distinguished Teaching, Wake Forest University and was one of twelve scholars in the American Literature and Religion Project (Pew Trust & Erasmus Institute of Notre Dame). His major book, published in 1988 by the University of Notre Dame Press, is entitled The Comedy of Redemption: Christian Faith and Comic Vision in Four American Novelists (Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, John Updike, and Peter De Vries). He is also the author of Contending for the Faith: The Church's Engagement with Culture (Baylor, 2003); The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle-earth (Westminster John Knox, 2004); Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South (Eerdmans, 2004); Literature and Theology (Abingdon, 2008); Preaching and Professing: Sermons by a Teacher Seeking to Proclaim the Gospel (Eerdmans, 2009)

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Website: Dr. Wood at Baylor University

Second Public Lecture by Dr. Wood: Tuesday, September 22 @ 7:30 p.m at Regent College, Wesbrook Mall at University Boulevard: “Flannery O’Connor on the Culture of Life and the Culture of Death”

Tony Cummins , Professor of Religious Studies, Trinity Western University

Thursday, November 26, 4-5:30 PM, Woodward Room 5

Gospel Narrative and Cultural Criticism: Reading the New Testament Gospels in a Secular World

ABSTRACT
Arguably the New Testament Gospels – not least, the Gospel of John - are essentially narrative and theological documents which together envisage and seek to actualize a new humanity and created order of things. These distinctive yet mutually interpretative texts depict a protagonist, Jesus of Nazareth, whose misunderstood identity and mission disclose and enact a reign of God which subverts and sublimates the status quo. All merely self-serving human agendas – social, political, religious, and otherwise – are radically reconfigured around Jesus’ self-sacrificial death and resurrection, the pivotal point within an unfolding economy of God which entails the remaking of humanity and the world.
Too often this expansive vision and operation has been diminished in modern historical-critical approaches to the New Testament, with Jesus and the Gospels increasingly historicized, privatized and marginalized in relation to an ever more secular western world. By way of modest response to such a situation, this presentation considers how central features of the Gospel of John might be brought into critical and constructive conversation with aspects of Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s recent work, A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007). This dialogue shows how the correlation of certain facets of the Gospel narratives and contemporary cultural criticism can address crucial features of human life in our contested secular western world.

BIOGRAPHY
Tony Cummins, D.Phil. (Oxford), is Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the M.A. program in Biblical Studies at Trinity Western University, Langley, BC. He teaches and writes in New Testament studies and theology, with particular interests in Jesus and the Gospels, Paul, and theological interpretation.

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Website: Tony Cummins at Trinity Western University

Dr. Rikk Watts , Professor of New Testament, Regent College, Vancouver

From Pythagoras' Geometry to Croce's Historicism: Why the Christian Story is More Relevant than Ever

Tuesday, January 26, 4:00-5:30 PM, Woodward IRC 1.

ABSTRACT
From Pythagoras’ geometry, through Plato’s forms, to Croce’s immanent historicism, the tension between the personal and impersonal has characterized the search for coherence, certainty, and meaning. This dilemma can be cast in terms of the relationship between analytical and rhetorical forms of knowing. Analytics tends toward the descriptive, that which does not change, and thus science. Rhetoric in its ancient form concerns human decision about that which necessarily could be otherwise. In Cicero’s words, as an act of intentional imagination built on a shared vision of the good, the beautiful, and the true, rhetoric was the engine of civilization, that is, of human history. The failure of 19th century attempts at scientific history and recent studies in design theory both affirm the validity of these two domains of knowing.
However, since science, philosophy, and theology, even as they seek to analyze and explain the world, are themselves deeply historically embedded—abstract constructions of particular individuals—then history, even with all its problematics and ambiguities, is nevertheless the fundamental category of human existence. At the core of history stands personal agency and community. As Socrates, Kirkegaard and Nietzsche recognized, life was not about knowledge as an end in itself, but rather knowledge should be in the service of life. Strikingly, this is the heart of the Christian claim. Eschewing both metanarrative and Greek metaphysics, Christianity originally insisted that it was a story about an agent, whose fundamental concern was neither knowledge nor even individual virtue, but God’s life in us. As such, its astonishing claims as to the life of Jesus—necessarily so if they are to offer a truly radically new future—are to be mounted and judged not on a priori philosophical or naturalistic scientific grounds, but by historical and pragmatic, life-affirming grounds.

BIOGRAPHY
Professor Rikk Watts holds a PhD in New Testament from Cambridge University, UK. Initially trained as an aeronautical engineer, he undertook additional studies in Art History, Philosophy, and Sociology focusing on the history of ideas, while working for IBM in large systems. Although teaching primarily in the field of New Testament at Regent College, he has a wide range of interests, including the history of philosophy, hermeneutics, historiography, and the theory of rhetoric as it applies to design. He directs the New Testament program and lectures widely.

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Website: Rikk Watts at Regent College

Don N. Page
Professor, Department of Physics, University of Alberta

Wednesday March 17 2010, 4PM

“Scientific and Philosophical Challenges to Theism ”

ABSTRACT:
Modern science developed within a culture of Judeo-Christian theism, and science and theism have generally supported each other. However, there are certainly areas in both science and religion that puzzle me. Here I outline some puzzles that have arisen for me concerning everlasting life, human free will, divine free will, the simplicity and probability of God, the problem of evil, and the converse problem of elegance.

BIOGRAPHY:
Don N. Page grew up in small isolated villages in Alaska.  He studied by correspondence until he went to William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri, receiving a bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics in 1967.  He completed a Ph.D. in physics and astronomy in 1976 at the California Institute of Technology in California, under the supervision of Kip Thorne and Stephen Hawking. Page was a postdoctoral researcher under Hawking at the University of Cambridge in England 1976-79 where he worked on quantum gravity, the incompletely developed theory of gravity at very short distances, where the uncertainty principle is important.  He took up a faculty position in the Physics Department at Penn State University, becoming Professor in 1986.  In 1990 he moved to the University of Alberta, where he is a Fellow and an Associate of the Cosmology Programme of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.  Page currently works on black holes and quantum cosmology, and he is developing an interest in relating quantum mechanics and consciousness. Dr. Page is married to Catherine Anne Hotke;  they have three biological children, Andrew, John, and Anna, and two girls, Marie and Ziliana, adopted from Haiti.

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Website: Dr. Page at the University of Alberta