Video of Tal Howard’s lecture on Protestant theology now available

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Tal HowardTal Howard, professor of history at Gordon College, spoke on Tuesday, January 28 on the topic, “Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University.”

Professor Howard is director of the Center for Faith and Inquiry at Gordon College. He is also founding director of the Jerusalem and Athens Forum, a great books honors program in the history of Christian thought and literature. He is the author of numerous books and other publications, including Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University (Oxford, 2006) which won the Lilly Fellows Program Book Award in 2007, and most recently, God and the Atlantic: America, Europe, and the Religious Divide (Oxford, 2011), winner of a Christianity Today book of the year award in 2012.

Professor Howard’s lecture is now available to watch or read.

David Bentley Hart to speak on “The Experience of God”

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David Bentley HartDavid Bentley Hart, author of The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, will speak on his book on Tuesday, March 25 at the Bonhoeffer House. The lecture will be at 3:30 p.m., and all are invited.

David Bentley Hart is an Eastern Orthodox scholar of religion, philosopher, writer, and cultural commentator.

No parking will be available at the Bonhoeffer House. Visitor parking is available on Grounds at the Central Grounds Parking Garage. See walking directions from Grounds here or catch the Inner/Outer University Loop bus to the Beta Bridge stop (on maps: stop 80 inbound, stop 81 outbound).

About The Experience of God, from the publisher:
Despite the recent ferocious public debate about belief, the concept most central to the discussion—God—frequently remains vaguely and obscurely described. Are those engaged in these arguments even talking about the same thing? In a wide-ranging response to this confusion, esteemed scholar David Bentley Hart pursues a clarification of how the word “God” functions in the world’s great theistic faiths.

Ranging broadly across Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Vedantic and Bhaktic Hinduism, Sikhism, and Buddhism, Hart explores how these great intellectual traditions treat humanity’s knowledge of the divine mysteries. Constructing his argument around three principal metaphysical “moments”—being, consciousness, and bliss—the author demonstrates an essential continuity between our fundamental experience of reality and the ultimate reality to which that experience inevitably points.

Thoroughly dismissing such blatant misconceptions as the deists’ concept of God, as well as the fundamentalist view of the Bible as an objective historical record, Hart provides a welcome antidote to simplistic manifestoes. In doing so, he plumbs the depths of humanity’s experience of the world as powerful evidence for the reality of God and captures the beauty and poetry of traditional reflection upon the divine.

Virginia Seminar Featured Member: Susan Holman

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Susan R. HolmanProject alumna and consultant for the Virginia Seminar class of 2014, Susan R. Holman is senior writer at the Harvard Global Health Institute. She received her BS and MS degrees in nutrition, completing her dietetic internship at the Frances Stern Nutrition Center and Tufts University’s Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. She pursued further graduate work in religious studies, obtaining an MTS from Harvard Divinity School and a PhD from Brown University. She writes and speaks as an international scholar on faith-based responses to poverty, with a focus on health issues.

She is an academic writer, editor, occasional guest speaker and lecturer, and sometimes-mentor in religion, early Christianity, and social justice issues. Susan is now working on a new book (also under contract with Oxford) that is tentatively titled Just Believing: Global Health and Human Rights for People of Faith. She is also the creator and curator of two websites, Jottings and Poverty Studies, both intended to encourage ecumenical and cross-disciplinary dialogue between the academic study of religion and contemporary community service.

To visit Susan’s PLT author page where you can find out more about her past and current projects, along with some fun facts, click here.

Diana Butler Bass audio and video now available

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Diana Butler BassLast November, Diana Butler Bass gave the 2013 Capps Lecture in Christian Theology and led an informal afternoon workshop at the University of Virginia.

Dr. Bass is a scholar of American religion and culture, and her lecture considered the rapidly changing religious and political landscape of the United States and its implications for the future of the church. You can watch her video or listen to her lecture.

Dr. Bass holds a PhD in religious studies from Duke University and is the author of eight books, including Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening. She blogs for The Huffington Post and is a commentator for USA Today, Time, Newsweek and The Washington Post. Diana Butler Bass has taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Macalester College, Rhodes College and the Virginia Theological Seminary.

The Capps Lectures are endowed by Dr. and Mrs. W. Jerry Capps and co-sponsored by the Project on Lived Theology and Theological Horizons.