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. Steven Bouma Prediger, Professor of Religion, Hope College

Thursday, September 30, 4:00-5:30 PM, McLeod Building, Room 228

Shalom and the Character of Earth Keeping

ABSTRACT
Dr. Bouma-Prediger will reframe the discussion of environmental ethics according to virtues, instead of its usual focus on duties, rights and consequences. Virtue ethics, presently in philosophical recovery, traces its roots back to Aristotle. One of the central images and themes of Judeo-Christian Scripture is shalom. Shalom connotes not merely the absence of conflict but the flourishing of all things. It includes wolves and lambs, trees and soils, forests and rivers, as well as people of all kinds and their attendant communities. What are the character traits necessary for those who would be earthkeepers (responsible stewards of the totality of creation) working toward shalom? “A virtue is a state of praiseworthy character—with the attendant desires, attitudes and emotions. Formed by choices over time, a virtue disposes us to act in certain excellent ways. Knowing which way is the truly excellent way involves avoiding the extremes of vice by looking to people of virtue as role models. As certain virtues shape our character they influence how we see the world. And the entire process of forming virtues is shaped by a particular narrative and community. The settled disposition to act well, which makes us who we are, is nurtured by the stories we imbibe and the communities of which we are a part.” Steven Bouma-Prediger from For the Beauty of the Earth. What are the virtues required for those who would bear witness to shalom and ensure the flourishing of all stakeholders?

BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Bouma-Prediger is an esteemed professor of religion and chair of the department of religion at Hope College in Holland, Michigan where he has taught since 1994. His scholarship focuses on ecology and theology. Prior to coming to Hope, he was an assistant professor of philosophy and chair of the department at North Park College in Chicago. He holds an M.Phil. from the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto, an M.Div. from Fuller Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. His numerous publications include five books: Beyond Homelessness: Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement, co-authored with Brian Walsh; For the Beauty of the Earth: a Christian Vision for Creation Care; Evocations of Grace: Writings of Joseph Sittler on Ecology, Theology, and Ethics, co-edited with Peter Bakken; The Greening of Theology: The Ecological Models of Rosemary Radford Ruether, Joseph Sittler, and Jurgen Moltmann; and, with Virginia Vroblesky, Assessing the Ark: A Christian Perspective on Nonhuman Creatures and the Endangered Species Act. He is also the author of numerous published scholarly articles.

For the Beauty of the Earth (now in its revised second edition) won an Award of Merit from prediocial Christianity Today in the theology and ethics category on the 2001 Book Award program. In December 1999, Steven was electedthe recipient of Hope College's Outstanding professor Educator Award.

Download the lecture here (not available)

Panel discussion with Dr. Rod Wilson and Dr. Sharon Smith

Religion and Mental Illness in Tension?

Tuesday, November 9, 5 PM, Woodward IRC Room 6

ABSTRACT
According to the Canadian Mental Health Association, one in every five Canadians will experience a mental health problem at some point in their lives. The stigma surrounding these conditions means that people often experience misunderstanding and even discrimination; they are then fearful of admitting the problem and seeking help. Misconceptions about mental illness are rife. Christians dealing with these issues often face an added dilemma: to struggle with depression, bi-polar disorder, or anxiety can get interpreted as a form of spiritual inferiority. As Dwight L. Carlson notes, such attitudes may cause hurting and wounded individuals to isolate themselves from a potentially beneficial support network within a religious community. The psychiatric community has perhaps too often given Christians reason to feel uncomfortable because some anti-religious sentiments still linger. Specialists sometimes claim that religious beliefs are part of the mental illness, i.e. that religious belief itself is neurotic. This conception is problematic and can prevent people from seeking the professional help they need.

The panel will critically address such issues and will examine how people suffering from mental illness can overcome such barriers. This entails not only drug therapy and counseling care provided by medical specialists, but also spiritual care. This discussion ought to engage professionals and family members who care for struggling people. It also should interest intellectuals who wrestle with the interface of religion and mental illness. Panelists Rod Wilson and Sharon Smith have a strong professional interest and investment in this arena of care. Rod Wilson will draw on his training in psychology (PhD York University) to address the importance of viewing mental illness as an embodied condition that often requires material remedies (medication) rather than a disembodied problem that requires only a spiritual (Gnostic) cure; he will address the latent suspicion of medication that is entrenched in some contemporary Christian circles. Sharon Smith will speak out of her experience with mental illness in a faith community, as well as from her PhD research on facilitating discussions of spirituality among Schizophrenia sufferers.

BIOGRAPHIES
Dr. Rod Wilson is President and Professor of Counseling and Psychology at Regent College on the UBC campus. He has been involved in the field of counseling and consulting for over 30 years, and has authored and co-authored numerous books and articles, including Counseling and Community , How Do I Help a Hurting Friend , Exploring Your Anger , and Helping Angry People . He is a prominent contributor in public and academic discussion of Christianity and psychology, and he holds a doctorate in psychology from York University and an honorary doctorate from Trinity Western University in recognition of his gifts of leadership and acuity of vision.

Dr. Sharon Smith has her PhD in Rehabilitation Sciences at UBC. She is currently Sessional Lecturer in Department of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy at UBC and Spirituality Consultant for the Vancouver Community Mental Health exploring ways to better integrate spirituality into our mental health services.

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D. Stephen Long, Professor of Theology, Marquette University

Christian, Ethics and the Good: Strained but Necessary Partners

Wednesday, January 26 at 4:00 p.m. Woodward (IRC) Room 5

ABSTRACT
To bring the terms Christian and Ethics together and treat them as referring to a common subject matter might strike persons of faith or those without it as odd, perhaps even as a contradiction. For some modern persons, the term Christian conjures up images of past immoral activities: crusades, the Inquisition, the conquest of the Americas, religious wars, the Galileo affair, defenses of slavery and patriarchy. To qualify ethics by Christian would regress to a time before the considerable gains of living well we moderns accomplished. Ethics liberates us from harmful Christian practices. Yet those who reject faith are not the only ones who find the juxtaposition of the terms Christian and Ethics troubling, albeit for very different reasons. Ethics is most often understood as a thoroughly human endeavor. We are ethical through our own resources. One of the greatest ethicists who ever lived, Aristotle, taught this. For him every thing has a natural end to which it is directed. For instance, the end of an acorn is to be an oak tree. Intrinsic to an acorn’s nature are the means to achieve this end. With the right nurturing, proper soil, light, and nutriments the acorn will naturally achieve its end. Likewise the human creature has a natural, ethical end, which is to live a good life that achieves happiness, or what in Greek is called eudaimonia. We have everything in our nature that we need for such an end if it flourishes in the proper circumstances. Nonetheless, both the historical practice of Christianity and its own doctrines require a Christian assessment of ethics and an ethical assessment of Christianity. Christianity may be more, but it should never be less, than ethical. Sometimes the beauty of non-Christian ethics compels Christianity to be accountable to that ethics. Sometimes the reduction of Christianity to ethics requires it to insist that it is more than ethics. Even the term super-natural assumes a role for the natural. Although Christianity never assumes that we can finally redeem ourselves, the more (super-) that is given to the natural presumes a role for nature in redemption. In this lecture, I shall argue that the pursuit of the good is necessary as that to which Christian ethics must be accountable, and that makes it overlap with other, even pagan pursuits of the good. But Christian theology is also necessary to recognize that the good itself comes as gift.

BIOGRAPHY
Steve Long is professor of Systematic Theology at Marquette University. Previously he worked at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, St. Joseph’s University and Duke Divinity School. He is an ordained United Methodist and served churches in Honduras and North Carolina. He has published seven books: Living the Discipline: United Methodist Theological Reflections on War, Civilization, and Holiness (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmanns, 1992), Tragedy, Tradition, Transformism: The Ethics of Paul Ramsey (Boulder, Oxford: Westview Press, 1993) Divine Economy: Theology and the Market (London and New York, Routledge, 2000) The Goodness of God: Theology, Church and Social Order, (Brazos Press, 2001) and John Wesley’s Moral Theology: The Quest for God and Goodness (Kingswood, 2005), Calculated Futures, (Baylor, 2007), Theology and Culture (Cascade, 2008). An eighth work is in process Speaking of God: Theology, Truth and Language (Eerdmans, 2008). Steve was baptized by the Anabaptists, educated by the evangelicals, ordained and pastorally formed by the Methodists and given his first position as professor of theology by the Jesuits, which makes him either ecumenically inclined or theologically confused. He is married to Ricka and they have three children, Lindsey, Rebecca and Jonathan.

Note: On Tuesday, January 25 at 7:30 p.m., Dr. D. Stephen Long will speak at Regent College on the topic: First Principles and the Logic of Christianity and the Market

Download the lecture here (not available)

Faraday Film & UBC Faculty Panel on Science & Faith

Event co-sponsored with Canadian Science and Christian Affiliation

Thursday, February 24 @ 4:00 p.m. Woodward (IRC) Room 4

UBC Panelists:

Dr Dennis Danielson (UBC English Department, editor of The Book of the Cosmos)

Richard Baartman (Senior Researcher TRIUMF, Canada's National Laboratory for Particle and Nuclear Physics)

Craig Mitton (Senior Scientist at the Centre for Clinical Epidemiology and Evaluation)

This high quality Faraday film called Test of Faith involves responses to the following probing questions by highly qualified experts from Oxford and Cambridge Universities, plus NASA. A number of these professors of science have been visiting scholars at UBC through GFCF. The viewing of the film will be followed by a lively Q & A session with the distinguished UBC panel.

Experts in the film:

Sir John Polkinghorne, former top Mathematical Physicist, former President of Queens’ College, Cambridge, and a World Authority on the Science and Religion Discourse

Ard Louis, Theoretical Physics, Oxford University

Jennifer Wiseman, NASA Astrophysicist

Simon Conway Morris, Earth Science, Cambridge University

Katherine Blundell, Astrophysics, Oxford University

Alister McGrath, Historian of Science, King’s College London

Questions investigated:

What grounds science ideologically and culturally?

Whence comes the mathematical order?

Are science and Christianity in a deadlock conflict, or is there possibly any synergism between science & faith?

Does the Big Bang eliminate the need for God?

Could the theory of a multiverse provide an explanation for our finely-tuned but improbable existence on planet earth?

Wednesday, March 9 @ 4:00 p.m. Woodward (IRC) Room 3

Dr. James Peterson

R. A. Hope Professor of Theology and Ethics
McMaster Divinity College and
Faculty of Health Sciences McMaster University

ABSTRACT
Professor Peterson's newest book (2010), Changing Human Nature: ecology, ethics, genes, and God observes that our material world and we human beings have always been in continual flux. The question posed by this volume is whether we will be conscientious about the direction of such change, and how we contribute to it. With the recent completion of the mapping of the human genome, we find ourselves at the edge of a new and exciting scientific frontier, with an explosion of information. Human beings have a powerful and unique capacity to manipulate this genome and thus the future of human physical form. But we also have a calling and responsibility, as good stewards, to manage and develop this knowledge for the good, according to orthodox reading of the Christian tradition. Peterson offers a larger reflective context and some important standards for how we can think about such vital and formative present and future decisions.  

BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Peterson has served as a professor of theology and ethics at McMaster University and he has given invited lectures on three continents from Queens to Harvard to Oxford Universities. He holds a second appointment at McMaster as a member of the Faculty of Health Sciences where he is interested in clinical ethics, technology evaluation, and medical education. He is research Fellow in Molecular and Clinical Genetics on a grant funded by the National Institute of Health. He enjoys working through real-world ethical challenges with students, academics, the general public and church community. He was a fellow for a Science and Theology Think Tank convened by the Faculty of Oxford University 1999-2001, and served on the National Bioethics Commission of the American Scientific Affiliation, and as a member of the Research Ethics Board at McMaster. Along the way, he has received two Templeton awards for his contributions to the interdisciplinary field of science, theology and ethics. He has published numerous articles and books such as Genetic Turning Points: The Ethics of Human Genetic Intervention. Grand Rapids : Eerdmans, 2001 .