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What does Oxford have to do with Jerusalem?
I’m reading Keith Ward’s More than Matter? and found it interesting to learn that two of Ward’s teachers were the Oxford philosophers Gilbert Ryle and A.J. Ayer. Ryle was famous for characterizing Cartesian dualism as “the ghost in the machine,” and Ayer was the famed proponent of logical positivism. Ward says that he came to…
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The witness of John Stott
I’ve been reading some of the remembrances of John Stott, the Church of England pastor and evangelical icon who passed away today at the age of 90. One of the most striking things is that Stott seems to be fondly remembered by nearly everyone across the spectrum of evangelicalism. He combined theological orthodoxy (even conservatism)…
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New atheism as 19th-century positivism redux
This article puts its finger on one of the problems I’ve long had with the so-called new atheism: [I]n its basic outlines [A.C.] Grayling’s humanism is that of the nineteenth-century positivists, who built a philosophy around their belief in the perfectability of human nature. For Grayling, and for the other New Atheists, reason doesn’t just…
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The Lord God made them all
Bertram of Minden, “Creation of the Animals,” from the Grabow altarpiece (1383)
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A word for Borders
If you care about books, you’ve probably heard that Borders is finally shutting its doors for good. I’m so old I can remember when big national bookseller chains were villified for driving out small independent booksellers. Now these big national chains are being run out of business by Amazon and e-readers. One era’s Goliath is…
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Macquarrie on hell and universalism
If heaven is fullness of being and the upper limit of human existence, hell may be taken as loss of being and the lower limit. Loss of being need not mean annihilation, but includes every declination from a genuinely personal existence and every divergence from the fulfillment of authentic potentialities for being. Thus hell, like…
