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.

"Ought We to Fear Death ?"

ABSTRACT:
The lecture will look in general at Augustine's discriminating attitude to pagan philosophy, and then focus on the Epicurean argument that it is wrong to fear death. While it might be thought that a Christian could appropriate some elements of the Epicurean view, Augustine (at least in his later years) repudiates it entirely. We shall reflect on why this should be.

Professor Helm was professor of the History and Philosophy of Religion at King's College London 1993-2000. Prior to that he was Reader in Philosophy at Liverpool University. Now he is the J.I.Packer Chair of Philosophical Theology at Regent College, Vancouver (part time.) Professor Helm is the author of a few books, including Eternal God (Clarendon Press, 1988), The Providence of God (IVP 1993), Belief Policies (Cambridge University Press, 1994), Faith and Understanding (Edinburgh University Press, 1997), Faith with Reason, (Oxford University Press, 2000), which were the Stanton Lectures at Cambridge, and he is in the course of finishing John Calvin's Ideas (OUP, 2004).

FRANCIS COLLINS, Director, United States National Human Genome Research Institute

Wednesday october 29th 2003, Hebb Theatre, 2045 East Mall

"Are We More than Our Genes ?"

SIR GHILLEAN PRANCE, Scientific Director, The Eden Project, Cornwall, England

Thursday november 13th 2003, Liu Centre for Global Issues, 6476 NW Marine Drive

"Earth Under Threat: People and Plants of the Amazon rainforest"

ABSTRACT:
The lecture will focus on some ethical questions from ethnobotanical work. Details will be given of work amongst four tribes of Amazonian Indians and compared with more recent work in Samoa. It will include details of arrow poisons, narcotics and fish poisons. Questions will be raised about how far missionary work should influence an indigenous culture and some contrast between working in the Christian environment of Samoa where local culture has remained and with Brazilian Indians where missionary work usually leads to acculturation. It is argued that any missionary work must endeavour to help converts to maintain their strong environmental ethics rather than marginalise them.

Professor Sir Ghillean Prance, former director of the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew and senior vice president of the New York Botanical Garden, is currently scientific director of the Eden Project in Cornwall. A plant taxonomist, he has spent more than eight years in Amazonian Brazil, conducting botanical exploration. The recipient of fourteen honorary degrees, he has written thirteen books, edited nearly a dozen more, and published over 300 papers on plant systematics, plant ecology, ethnobotany and conservation. Reflecting on his field work and general observations in the Amazon and elsewhere, he has written that "a great many of the environmental problems facing the world today are the result of inappropriate technology in both the tropical and temperate regions of the world. The use of inappropriate technology leads not only to environmental degradation but also to injustice, which should be a major concern to the Christian believer. Christians must develop a sound biblical theology of creation . . . to ensure that they continue to worship the creator and not the creation, which has become the god of so many secular environmentalists".

GORDON CARKNER, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Wales

Tuesday january 20th 2004, Dodson Room, Main Library

"Charles Taylor and the Retrieval of the Good in Ethical Discourse"

OWEN GINGERICH, Professor of Astronomy and History of Science, Harvard University, Massachusetts

Wednesday february 11th 2004, Hebb Theatre, 2045 East Mall

"Dare a Scientist Believe in Design?"

MARK FACKLER, Professor of Communication, Calvin College, Michigan

Tuesday march 2nd 2004, Dodson Room, Main Library

"Forbidden Knowledge and the Flick of a Button"

JANET DANIELSON, Chair, Association of Canadian Women Composers and Instructor, Simon Fraser University

Tuesday march 23rd 2004, Dodson Room, Main Library

"The Marvelous History of Marieken of Nimmigen and the Process of Writing Opera"

with Robyn Driedger-Klassen singing excerpts from the role of Mariken

ABSTRACT:
Janet Danielson is a composer and music educator working in Vancouver. Upon receiving a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Victoria and winning the Canadian League of Composers National Award for Young Canadian Composers, she spent a year in England studying composition and Marxist-Leninist thought with Cornelius Cardew. She completed a Master of Fine Arts degree in music composition at the California Institute of the Arts, where she worked with Harold Budd, Earle Brown, and Morton Subotnick. Since then she has been composing, arranging, and teaching in a wide range of places and situations. She has taught at the University of British Columbia, and is instructor at Simon Fraser University. She was president of Vancouver New Music for four years, and is presently chair of the Association of Canadian Women Composers. Her music has been described as having ”something of the somber devotional quality of Arvo Pärt, combined with a keen textural sensuality”.

Janet Danielson's The Marvelous History of Marieken of Nimmigen is an opera that reconstructs a long-suppressed medieval Dutch morality play about a young girl in thrall to the devil until she feels new emotions after seeing the artistry of a simple wagon-play. The excerpt's mob-scene of confrontations yielded some sensuous, long-lined, highly attractive music.