Introduction
As an expression of the theological engagement of the Christian faith with all the forces shaping the contemporary world, the Center offers a series of public lectures each year to encourage thoughtful conversation about contemporary issues.
The Center publishes each year's lectures as a volume in its Reflections series. You may order copies of Volumes 1-8 (1997-2005) by contacting the Center. Read individual essays and entire volumes at the Reflections archive.
Reflections, Volume 1: The 1997 Public Lecture Series
Einstein thought God as revealed in the harmony and rational beauty
of the universe called for a non-conceptual intuitive response in the
humility, wonder and awe associated with science and art.
The purpose of a historical understanding is not so much to detect the
Divine action in history as to understand the human action, that is, human
activities, in the bewildering variety and confusion in which they appear
to a human observer.
Christian theology is public for it speaks of the kingdom of God.
What does it say in our present crisis of values?
Reflections, Volume 2: The 1998 Public Lectures
Can science's account of the regularity of nature be reconciled
with Christianity's talk of the God who acts in history?
- Theology and Cultural
Contexts by Jan Milic Lochman
There is more in my life than what I can realize. There is more in
the story of humankind than what we can achieve-or destroy. - Paul's Gospel and Caesar's Empire by N.T. Wright
If Paul's answer to Caesar is the empire of Jesus, what is an empire under the
rule of this new lord? How does Paul's gospel line up with Caesar's empire?
Reflections, Volume 3: The 1999 Public Lectures
How should Christian theology, for the sake of its own truth and mission,
think about Israel, and about continuing Jewish identity?
Outdated models of the relationship of science and theology can be discarded
in favor of a joint exploration into a common reality some aspects of which will
prove, in the end, to be ultimate and thus divine.
To rightly conceive of God's eternity and properly understand eternity's relation
to time, we must interpret it as the eternity of the Trinitarian God.
Modern theology has marginalized two traditions: the realism of the cross which
acknowledges God's hiddeness, and apophatic theology, which displays God's incomprehensibility.
Reflections, Volume 4: The 2000 Public Lectures
- What If It Were True?
by Robert W. Jenson
So soon as we pose the question, "What indeed if it were true?",
about any ordinary proposition of the faith, consequences begin to show
themselves that upset our whole basked of assured convictions.
- Scientific Understanding and the Point of the Universe by Keith Ward
For the theist, the purpose for which created persons exist may only
be fully realized outside this physical universe, even if it is essential
to them to begin their existence in this universe.
To be a preacher, a "sower of the Word of God", and not to be a theologian,
was the job description of any late Roman bishop. Augustine was no exception.
It is his letters and sermons that take us to the heart of his life as a
Christian leader in North Africa.
Reflections, Volume 5: The 2001 Public Lectures
As with modern astrophysical ideas, ancient Christian ideas of a new heaven
and a new earth are a rational revisioning of a new and different physics.
A form of deepened spiritual perception—"not with the eye only", in the words
of the poet R.S. Thomas—has to be in play if we are to account for seeing
the risen Christ today.
The very strangeness of the Passion Narrative may present some warrant of
verisimilitude, and provide new ground for historical plausibility that casts light
upon the universal significance of Christ's death, as claimed by the first Christians.
Reflections, Volume 6: The 2002 Public Lectures
Dietrich Bonhoeffer rightly understood that the gift the church gives
to any politics is the truthful proclamation of the Gospel.
Divisions between the Churches prevent them from giving a common
witness to life, justice, peace, human dignity and solidarity in a world
which urgently needs such a common testimony.
If the understanding of the self of older Israelite literature is taken
into account, the affinities of biblical narratives with the doctrine
of the resurrection of the dead are greater than first appears.
Reflections, Volume 7: The 2003 Public Lectures
Contemporary issues in bioethics have deep and enduring roots in our devotion to technology, and especially its relation to the universal humanistic dream. Pondering the story of the city and the tower of Babel, in the context of what precedes and follows, any wisdom-seeking reader may come to see it from God’s point of view.
A small number of writers have adapted the style and conventions of science-fiction to tell stories that have little to do with science but much to do with theology. Writers of theofiction present a vision that is primarily religious rather than scientific, and raise important new questions that traditional theology has ignored.
Divisions between the Churches prevent them from giving a common witness to life, justice, peace, human dignity and solidarity in a world which urgently needs such a common testimony.
Reflections, Volume 8: The 2004-2005 Public Lectures
The move to a kenotic response to natural theodicy offers a promising road to pursue in future research and could lead to a reconstructing of eschatology which gives intelligibility and credibility to Christian hope in light of scientific cosmology.
In seeking to retrieve Christian humanism as an identity that stands in contrast to the religious fundamentalism and secularism that are destroying the foundations of human well-being, the insights and legacy of Barth and Bonhoeffer are important.
God is not indifferent to the American experiment and therefore we who are called to think about God and His ways through time dare not be indifferent to the American experiment. America is not uniquely Babylon, but it is our place in Babylon.
Theology and science are moving toward consensus on a theory of human nature. Science promotes a view of humankind as thoroughly physical, while biblical studies and church history over the past century have also called body-soul dualism into question.
Reflections, Volume 9: The 2006 Public Lectures
Doctrines of the atonement have often failed to be rooted in the whole biblical story. An effective one needs to put us in the life of the Trinity in history.
Roman Catholicism's history of wrestling with modernity may provide helpful examples to Islam as it faces similar challenges.
The determination of death can be highly ambiguous. Both scientific and theological contributions are important to understand what is happening.
