THEORY TO NO END

Joanna Leidenhag is Lecturer in Theology and Liberal Arts at the University of Leeds, UK. She holds degrees from the University of St Andrews, Princeton Theological Seminary, and the University of Edinburgh. She is currently working on a book outlining how the natural and psychological sciences can be used as a constructive resource for theological reflection, as well as pursuing a project on theology & autism. Her first monograph, published with T&T Clark in 2021, is called Minding Creation: Theological Panpsychism and the Doctrine of Creation. In this book, Joanna argued that panpsychism provides a more promising metaphysical framework for a Christian doctrine of creation than emergence theory. In preparation for this book, Joanna published the article "A Critique of Emergent Theologies," which we discuss on this podcast.

Michael Millerman is a scholar of political philosophy working primarily on classical political rationalism and phenomenology. He is the author of Beginning with Heidegger: Strauss, Rorty, Derrida, Dugin and the Philosophical Constitution of the Political. He holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of British Columbia and an MA and PhD in Political Science (Political Theory) from the University of Toronto. In connection with his research, he has translated several books by the Russian political philosopher Alexander Dugin. For more information, visit michaelmillerman.ca.

In this episode we discuss Millerman's article titled, "The Ethnosociological and Existential Dimensions of Alexander Dugin's Populism" published in Telos 193, Winter 2020.

Gerald C. Liu is assistant professor of worship and preaching at Princeton Theological Seminary. He earned his BA in music at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, his Master of Divinity from the Candler School of Theology at Emory University (during which time he was also a theological fellow at Georg-August Universität in Göttingen, Germany), and his PhD from Vanderbilt University with a concentration in homiletics and liturgics.

Liu has previously served as a British Methodist minister in Nottingham, England before becoming ordained in the Mississippi Conference of the United Methodist Church. Currently, he volunteers as a minister in residence at Church of the Village, a United Methodist congregation in Manhattan, and he also preaches and teaches ecumenically in congregations and communities of faith nearby and abroad on a regular basis.

We discuss his book titled, Music and the Generosity of God (New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017).

David T. Pan is Professor of German and Chair of the Department of European Languages and Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and has previously held positions at Washington University in St. Louis, Stanford University, Penn State University, and McKinsey and Company. He is the author of Primitive Renaissance: Rethinking German Expressionism (2001) and Sacrifice in the Modern World: On the Particularity and Generality of Nazi Myth (2012). He has also published on J. G. Herder, Heinrich von Kleist, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Jünger, Bertolt Brecht, Carl Schmitt, and Theodor Adorno. He currently serves on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association, on the Commission on Unalienable Rights at the U.S. State Department, and as the Editor of Telos.

We discuss the Report of the Commission on Unalienable Rights (https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Draft-Report-of-the-Commission-on-Unalienable-Rights.pdf) and David Pan's article titled, "Unalienable Rights, the 1619 Project, and Nation-State Sovereignty" published in Telos, issue 192, Fall 2020.

Aryeh Botwinick is Professor of Religion at Temple University. He is the author of Skepticism, Belief, and the Modern: Maimonides to Nietzsche (Cornell University Press, 1997), Michael Oakeshott's Skepticism (Princeton University Press, 2011), and Emmanuel Levinas and the Limits to Ethics: A Critique and a Re-Appropriation (Routledge, 2014). His work focuses upon exploring the deep affinities and continuities between monotheism, skepticism, and liberalism—and how studying and theorizing them gives rise to new configurations for understanding both their history and their current potential.

The article we discuss is titled, "Negative Theology, Power, and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict." It was published in Telos, issue 192, Fall 2020.

Mark Noll is Research Professor of History at Regent College and a leading church historian. He recently retired as the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, having previously served as Professor of History and Theological Studies at Wheaton College. His teaching included courses on American religious and intellectual history, the Reformation, world Christianity, and Canadian history.

Michael C. Rea is Rev. John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame. His research focuses primarily on topics in metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and analytic theology. He has written or edited more than ten books and forty articles, and has given numerous lectures in the United States, United Kingdom, European Union, Russia, China, and Iran, including the 2017 Gifford Lectures at the University of St. Andrews.

Ilia Delio, OSF, PhD is a Franciscan Sister of Washington, DC and American theologian specializing in the area of science and religion, with interests in evolution, physics and neuroscience and the import of these for theology. She currently holds the Josephine C. Connelly Endowed Chair in Theology at Villanova University, and is the author of twenty books including Care for Creation (coauthored with Keith Warner and Pamela Woods) which won two Catholic Press Book Awards in 2009, first place for social concerns and second place in spirituality. Her book The Emergent Christ won a third place Catholic Press Book Award in 2011 for the area of Science and Religion. Her recent books include The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution and the Power of Love (Orbis, 2013), which received the 2014 Silver Nautilus Book Award and a third place Catholic Press Association Award for Faith and Science. Ilia holds two honorary doctorates, one from St. Francis University in 2015, and one from Sacred Heart University in 2020.

Additional titles and information can be found here: https://christogenesis.org/about/ilia-delio/

In this episode we discuss Ilia Delio's article titled, "Suffering and Sacrifice in an Unfinished Universe: The Energy of Love," published in Religions, July 2020.

Terrence W. Deacon is Professor in the Department of Anthropology and member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. His research combines developmental evolutionary biology and comparative neuroanatomy to investigate the evolution of human cognition, and is particularly focused on the explanation of emergent processes in biology and cognition.

Dr. Deacon received a Ph.D. in biological anthropology from Harvard university in 1984. He taught at Harvard from 1984-1992, at Boston University from 1992-2002, and was a research associate at McLean Hospital and the Harvard Medical School from 1992-2000, before joining the University of California, Berkeley. His honors include being a Harvard Lehman Fellow, a Harvard Medical School Psychiatric Neuroscience Fellow, a Western Washington University Centenary Alumni Fellow, and the 69th James Arthur Lecturer for the American Museum of Natural History.

He has published over 100 research papers in collected volumes and scholarly journals, and his acclaimed book, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain (W. W. Norton & Co., 1997) was awarded the I. J. Stanley Prize for the most influential book in Anthropology in 2005 by the School of American Research.

His 2012 book, Incomplete Nature: The Emergence of Mind from Matter, explores the problem of explaining the emergence of end-directed processes in nature, from biological functions to mental processes, and integrates many of his interests in complex biological systems.

In this interview we discuss his article titled, "The Emergent Process of Thinking as Reflected in Language Processing."