Forming a Christian Mind Autumn Study Day: Exploring the Human

You are warmly invited to Forming a Christian Mind's first ever Study Day which will take place on Saturday 16 November 2024 at the Old Divinity School, St John's College, Cambridge.

The day will include talks, Q&As and discipline-specific discussions on the topic of 'Exploring the Human', as we mark the 35 years anniversary of Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self and explore its relevance today. This event is for anyone doing postgraduate study or postdoctoral research.

In 2024 it is 35 years since the publication of Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self. This Study Day will take this anniversary as a prompt to think about the importance of maintaining a robustly Christian account of the human as both the foundation of good scholarship and the means by which we might meaningfully engage with some of the most pressing academic and cultural discussions about the place of the individual in modernity. We will also consider how, in light of the present challenges, we might go about retrieving, or resourcing, Protestant theological anthropology, and consider how to do so across the different academic disciplines.

This Study Day is part of our wider 'Exploring the Human' theme for the 2024-2025 academic year, which will be continued at our spring conference on Saturday 22 February 2025 on 'Exploring the Human: As Colleagues and Teachers'. Also at St John's Old Divinity School, Cambridge, this conference will be more vocational in its focus. It will build on the autumn Study Day and explore how our commitment to a robustly Christian account of the human should shape our attitude to our teaching, pastoral, and collegial responsibilities.

Dr Kirsten Birkett and Prof James Eglinton will speak in the morning on the significance and relevance of Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self for understanding what it means to be human in today's world, and how we might go about retrieving, or re-sourcing, Protestant theological anthropology. There will then be time for collaborative group discussion, before breaking for lunch, which will be provided.

After lunch we will hear from Aden Cotterill on understandings of the human in the academy in 2024. We will then split into groups for discpline-specific discussions, in which we will consider what this means for our own area of scholarship. To prepare for these group sessions, participants will be asked to read and reflect on two extracts in advance, one from Sources of the Self and one from their chosen discipline-specific track. Prof Eglinton will close the day for us with a second plenary session and time for Q&A.

For more information and to join our mailing list to stay up to date please visit: www.formingachristianmind.org

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Not a postgraduate student, postdoctoral researcher or junior academic in the UK or Europe?

To allow for more peer-to-peer discussion between delegates, and time to meet with and learn from fellow Christians in academia, the Study Day will be smaller in size than regular Forming a Christian Mind conferences. We therefore ask that only current postgraduate students, post-doctoral researchers or other early career academics register for this event. The spring conference, however, will also be open to other students, academics and those in university ministries.

Please note that this conference will be in-person only. Tickets are non-transferable.

Kirsten Birkett originally trained in science with a PhD in history and philosophy of science. After studying theology in Sydney, she moved to Oak Hill Theological College in London and taught for fourteen years, particularly in philosophy and ethics, obtaining further degrees in higher education and medieval history. She now works in publications for Church Society and will soon be starting a second PhD in emotional conversion in the early church. She has written extensively applying Christian theology to worldview and psychology.

James Eglinton is the Meldrum Senior Lecturer in Reformed Theology at New College, the University of Edinburgh, where he completed his PhD on Dutch dogmatician Herman Bavinck. His research and writing has mostly focused on neo-Calvinism, a form of Reformed Christianity that developed between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Netherlands, and that has continued to evolve in a range of international contexts. He has written and co-edited several books, including Bavinck: A Critical Biography (Baker Academic, 2020), as well as co-translating editions of Bavinck's works. He serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Reformed Theology, published by Brill, and has written for The Times, The Herald, The Scotsman, Christianity Today, Modern Reformation, The Gospel Coalition, Desiring God, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and Nederlands Dagblad.

Aden Cotterill holds degrees in psychology, philosophy and theology and is currently studying for a PhD at Clare Hall, Cambridge, in the Faculty of Divinity, as a World Universities Ramsay Postgraduate Scholar and an Honorary PhD Scholar at the Woolf Institute. His thesis pursues a theological response to the concept of the nova effect, as articulated in Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, with special reference to the Czech theologian and priest Tomáš Halík. The "nova effect" refers to Taylor's suggestion that exploding religious and nonreligious plurality in Western contexts (nova) causes the "fragilization" of our beliefs (effect); new questions arise about our own taken-for-granted positions when we encounter the religious other in our midst.

09:00 - Arrival and registration

09:30 - Welcome

09:45 - Plenary (Dr Kirsten Birkett)

10:15 - Plenary (Prof James Eglinton)

11:00 - Q&A session

11:15 - Tea & coffee

11:45 - Group discussion

12:45 - Lunch (provided)

14:00 - Plenary (Aden Cotterill)

14:30 - Discipline-specific group discussion

15:30 - Break

15:45 - Plenary and Q&A (Prof James Eglinton)

16:30 - Close and optional pub trip

Host or Publisher Forming a Christian Mind (FACM)