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Ron Belgau, “What Hope Can the Church Offer to Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Christians?” Thursday, April 21 2016

“Hope, of course, as understood by Christians, is not just getting what you want: it’s trusting in God’s will and His promises.

This then would provide a way of framing the question of God’s, as it is found in Scripture in terms of what trust and obedience points to, and how the Church can help people get there. So I would be approaching the question of homosexuality (focusing on 1 Cor 6:9-11), but doing so in a way that was not just about saying no to sex, but also more positive about what to hope for in discipleship.”

http://icl.nd.edu/events/gay-in-christ-dimensions-of-fidelity/ron-belgau/

Dr. Steven Garber, “THOU MAYEST: John Steinbeck, Vaclav Havel, and Marcus Mumford on the Human Condition, and What They Mean for Life and Learning” Friday, March 27 2015

Dr. Steven Garber, “THOU MAYEST – Q&A” Friday, March 27 2015

Dr. Steven Garber

Dr. Marvin Olasky, “How to Climb Down the Ladder of Abstraction, Raft the Rapids, and Be Neither a Know-It-All Nor a Know-Nothing” Friday, January 30 2015

Olasky was a professor at The University of Texas at Austin from 1983 to 2007 and provost of The King’s College in New York City from 2007 to 2011. He is now dean of the World Journalism Institute and a senior fellow of the Acton Institute.

He is editor-in-chief of WORLD Magazine, the author of more than 20 books, including Turning Point: A Christian Worldview Declaration and The Tragedy of American Compassion, and is a Distinguished Chair in Journalism and Public Policy at Patrick Henry College. He has been married since 1976 to writer Susan Olasky, and they have four sons and one granddaughter.

Dr. Ralph Wood, “Fyodor Dostoevsky, Flannery O’Connor, and Christ Pantocrator” Friday, October 3 2014

Ralph C. Wood, University Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, holds B.A. and M.A. degrees from Texas A&M University-Commerce, as well as M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chicago. From 1971-97 he taught on the faculty of Wake Forest University, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he was the John Allen Easley Professor of Religion. At Baylor, he teaches in both the Great Texts program and the Department of Religion. He serves as an editor-at-large for theChristian Century and as a member of the editorial board of the Flannery O’Connor Review.

His major book, first published in 1988 and still in print from the University of Notre Dame Press, is entitled The Comedy of Redemption: Christian Faith and Comic Vision in Four American Novelists (Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, John Updike, and Peter De Vries). He is also the author of Contending for the Faith: The Church’s Engagement with Culture (Baylor, 2003); The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle-earth (Westminster John Knox, 2004); and Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South(Eerdmans, 2004)

Mardi Keyes, “Mindfulness” Friday, September 26 2014

Dick Keyes, “Violence” Friday, September 26 2014

Dr. Rob Koons, “Secret Agent, Rebel, or Insider: Three Models for Integrating Faith and the Academic Life.” Friday, October 25 2013

He teaches metaphysics, philosophy of religion, philosophical logic, and ancient and medieval philosophy at the University of Texas. Dr. Koons has been at UT for 24 years, after having studied philosophy at Michigan State, Oxford and UCLA.

He has authored two books, Paradoxes of Belief and Strategic Rationality (Cambridge Univ., 1997) and Realism Regained (Oxford Univ., 2000), and co-edited a third, The Waning of Materialism (OUP, 2010, with George Bealer). Dr. Koons and Tim Pickavance are at work on a textbook in Metaphysics for Blackwell/Wiley.

He is the president of the Texas Association of Scholars, the statewide affiliate of the NAS, and is Senator-at-Large of the Phi Beta Kappa Society the nation’s oldest and most prestigious honor society.

Dr. Koons is  working on a comprehensive metaphysical theory, in the perennial tradition of Aristotle and Aquinas, and in a contemporary ‘analytic’ idiom. The theory is an “all of the above” ontology: universals (both essential and accidental), structures, events, processes, causal powers, and merely possible things. The set of basic material entities comprises homogeneous continua and organisms, but no artifacts or heaps. He defends a novel (purely modal) version of the A-Theory of time, one that includes past events as present entities. Dr. Koons is especially interested in working out the details of an account of processes, including social practices.

He also has an ongoing interest in natural theology, especially the First Cause argument, as well as in the relations (both historical and philosophical) between Christian theology and natural science.

Dr. Mark Regnerus, “The Economics of Sex and Marriage for Christians” Friday, March 04 2011

Mark Regnerus is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Premarital Sex in America, due out in December 2010 from Oxford University Press. Before that, he wrote Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford, 2007), which tells the story of how religion shapes teen sexual decision-making.

Forbidden Fruit was reviewed in Slate, the Dallas Morning News, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and The New Yorker, among other outlets.

His op-ed on the benefits of early marriage appeared in the Washington Post on April 26, 2009.

A cover article on early marriage appeared in the August 2009 issue of Christianity Today. Author of over 30 published articles and book chapters, his research is in the areas of sexual behavior, family, and religious behavior. In addition to his appointment in sociology, Mark is also a faculty research associate of the university’s Population Research Center.

He lives in Austin with his wife Deeann and their three children.

Dr. Bob Woodberry, “The Social Impact of Christianity” Friday, March 23 2012

Dr. Don Winget: The Truth, Naturally. Friday, March 02 2012

Dr. Don Winget, the Harlan J. Smith Centennial Professor in Astronomy at the University of Texas in Austin, will present a talk: The Truth, Naturally.

Dr. Winget was the chair of the Astronomy Department at the University of Texas in Austin from 2003 to 2007 and has received the University’s Distinguished Teaching Professor Award.  He earned his B.S. in Physics from the Univeristy of Illinois in 1976 and Astronomy from the University of Rochester in 1982.

When Don was growing up, he recalls watching a night-time parade. “I forgot all about the parade” he says, “and lay on my back on the curb, wondering about those points of light on the sky.”  That wonder became his life’s passion – astronomy.  For nearly thirty years, Don has studied white dwarf stars, the oldest stars in the universe, to determine the physics of high temperature and density matter, star evolution, whether there are other planets like Earth, galaxy structure, and the history of the universe.

For many years, Dr. Winget’s laboratory has been the McDonald Observatory near Fort Davis in southwest Texas, which he calls “his favorite spot on Earth.”  When Don and his finance Karen went there years ago, she was as moved as he was by the spectactular sky, and it was then that he knew that their marriage was made in heaven.  The two have been full partners in life and work.

Don and Karen find that science and Christinaity mesh.  “The heavens are telling the glory of God,” wrote the psalmist 3,000 years ago.  Don and Karen are listening.

http://www.as.utexas.edu/astronomy/people/winget/winget.html