The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As it is written in Isaiah the prophet, “Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way, the voice of one crying in the…
Category: Philosophy
Reclaiming the Hope of Faith: Medical Ethics and the Transformation of Culture
Much of our culture has been shaped by, or at least greatly influenced by, centuries of religious belief. Our Western culture has largely been shaped by Christian belief. However, the present-day multicultural matrix has resulted in the secularization of contemporary…
Special Issue: Philosophical Perspectives on the Self and the Search for Meaning
This special issue of In Pursuit of Truth contains four philosophical papers delivered at the Philosophy Symposium of the C.S. Lewis Summer Institute, Oxbridge 2008: The Self and the Search for Meaning. Oxbridge 2008 was the 7th meeting of this…
Self, Meaning, and the World
The search for a philosophically satisfying account of the self and meaning is partly the search for knowledge and understanding: knowledge of what there is and how those things are related, as well as understanding the significance of things. When…
The Human Search For the ‘Good Life’
I should start by saying that, although this philosophy symposium is about the search for meaning, discussions which rely on the term “meaning” in talking about the human search for a meaningful life seem to me to be largely modern…
The Image of God, Religion, and the Meaning of Life: Toward a Christian Philosophical Anthropology
Prospectus: This paper notes the challenge of scientific naturalism to religion and Christianity and briefly denies that naturalism is supported by science. It then outlines an alternative perspective in two stages. The first is an account of the biblical doctrine…
Physicalism, Dualism, Death, and Resurrection
In his essay “The Resurrection of the Body and the Life Everlasting,”[1] Trenton Merricks argues that the attitudes expressed by the writers of Scripture about both death and resurrection make more sense from a materialist perspective than from a dualist…
Self and Other in Lewis and Levinas
So far as I can tell, virtually no has commented on the connections between C. S. Lewis and Emmanuel Levinas-one possible exception being Pope John Paul II, a great admirer of both writers (see Hooper xii; John Paul II 36). But the connections are profound and undeniable. I’ve found no evidence that Levinas read Lewis’s work, nor any that Lewis was acquainted directly with the thought of Levinas, though Levinas became an important figure in French philosophical circles following World War II. The affinity between Lewis and Levinas must be explained in some way other than direct influence.
Visions of Beauty: Lothlorien and the Power of Beauty
There is something “perilous” about beauty and we are aware at some deep level of intuition or, better yet, at some vague awareness of a moral reality or “calling” that Beauty has within it the power to “change” us at some profound and ontological level of our existence. To follow a “trail’ that leads to “the Golden Wood” where one will knowingly encounter Beauty is one that requires courage and calls forth the essence of our character and reveals its flaws and weaknesses. It is here that we begin to acknowledge, again at some level, that Beauty contains within it the potential of great power and great goodness.
Kierkegaard on the Epistemological Benefits of Faith: From Divine Hiddenness to Human Selfhood
The first thing to note in reference to divine hiddenness is the fact that, for many, it is a deeply existential problem. The felt absence of God – for both believers and nonbelievers – may lead to hopelessness, despair, or indifference. Moving away from the existential dimension, however, we encounter the philosophical problem. The problem of divine hiddenness has generally been posed along these lines: If God exists, then the greatest possible good for an individual is that he or she relate to God in a loving relationship.