July 2013

The ideas of deep thinkers in religion are often at great variance from the average congregational member. Here, John Macquarrie (d.2007, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Macquarrie and http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/world/europe/03macquarrie.html?_r=0), Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford, gives us a superb account of exactly those theories which have been at the frontiers of religious thought in the twentieth century. You may be surprised […]

Alfred North Whitehead (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead) was one of the most brilliant minds of his age. In Adventures of Ideas (1933) he offers the most accessible statement of his conception of  ‘process philosophy’  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_philosophy). In a nutshell this challenges over 2000 years of popular philosophical assumptions. Namely, he rejects those philosophies that value static notions of being over

Andy Clark (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Clark), Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Edinburgh argues for the position of the Extended Mind (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Extended_Mind and http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/embodied-cognition/). In its crudest form the contention here is that our minds are not something confined to what’s going on inside our skulls. As Clark says.. “certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback,

The philosophy of time (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time/) is one of the most deeply perplexing subjects of all. In this exploration of the nature of human time the author explains the surprising ways in which our minds and bodies keep track of time, and how our sense of time is linked to our sense of self. Our lives are

Andrew (‘A.N.’) Wilson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wilson_(writer and http://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/18/magazine/the-busy-busy-wasp.html) offered us, in 1999, this study in the decline of religious certainties. The book focuses on artists and intellectuals and covers Gibbon, Hume, Kant, Marx, Garibaldi, Bentham, George Eliot, Lenin, Tennyson, Carlyle, Darwin, Huxley, Shaw, Hardy, Hegel and Freud among others. Very good on the devastating sense of emotional loss that

Given that the world is imperfect and can often seem drenched in suffering and disappointment it is hardly surprising that humans have invented utopias. Some of these are located on Earth at some distant place or some distant time. Others are located in the afterlife or some transcendental realm. The term ‘utopia’ was coined from the

Anyone out there pretty much wedded to Enlightenment ideals? I hope so. Sadly, in recent decades these have come under attack from a whole slew of irrationalisms. Cults, quackery, gurus, hysterical panics, moral confusion and an epidemic of mumbo-jumbo, pre-modernists and post-modernists, medieval theocrats and New Age mystics. They’re all here trying to drag us back

This is a hugely controversial thesis (1996) from Samuel P. Huntington. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_P._Huntington). His argument is that the fundamental source of conflict in the future will not primarily be ideological or economic but rather cultural. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future, he contends. Every fresh news story, particularly to do with