Continuing our series on local groups, Alan Chettle shares his experiences with us. Alan did his PhD in Manchester and has now gone back to Canada (where he’s spent most of his life) to take up an internship with the Graduate Student Ministry of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship in Vancouver.
This week we return to our series on local Christian postgraduate groups with a contribution from the Nottingham group. This group has been running for quite a number of years, with ups and downs. Alison Woodward and Esther Mokori tell us what they are up to at the moment:
Our series on “good scholarship” has so far considered the logical and lingual aspects of reality. Here I want to explore a particular kind of offence against principles of both logical distinction and lingual clarification.
Frank is a real life opera singer who was due to play the role of Scarpia in Puccini's famous opera Tosca. He was a gifted bass singer and had never heard a sermon that connected the Christian faith to his work challenges. On a hospital visit he asked his ear nose & throat surgeon whether as a Christian he should be taking on such a role.
Have you ever thought of clarity as a virtue? In the last post, Roy Clouser started our series on intellectual virtues by explaining the importance of the ‘logical’ or ‘analytical’ aspect of reality for scholarship. Clarity is a norm (a kind of goodness) that presupposes the norm of distinguishing logically; once we have good distinctions, we should seek to communicate these clearly. But why should Christians have anything to say about these basic norms?