How might love shape scholarship?

The Global Faculty Initiative is a wonderful enterprise to stimulate the interaction of university scholarship with theology. They employ the following methodology.

"Theology Brief: a longer essay by a leading theologian on a key theme in Christian theology

Disciplinary Briefs & Disciplinary Notes: short essays by research scholars that explore connections between their scholarly specialty and a Theology Brief"

The most recent Theology Brief is by Oliver O'Donovan, The Sovereignty of Love.

Here is my response, a Disciplinary Brief, 

The Radicalness of Love—for the Natural Sciences and the Research University.

The link above gives a PDF of my full article.  It is also available on the GFI website.

Here is the beginning.

Love should be primary for a Christian scholar

I was both surprised and challenged by O’Donovan’s argument that love should be primary for a Christian scholar. My prior perspective was that universities are primarily about thinking. Integrity, both intellectual and moral, should be the main characteristic of Christian scholars. This includes integrating disciplinary knowledge with theology. However, I now see that love should subsume integrity, just a Jesus challenged us.

O’Donovan states: “Those for whom specialised knowledge constitutes their sphere of work thus face a challenging question: how may they love that one aspect of the world which they know very well, while focussing their love finally upon God and their neighbours?” This challenge of a dual focus must be related to the question: how does one resist the temptation to worship the creation not the Creator (Romans 1:18-25)? As I discuss below, modern physics is truly amazing and beautiful. This has led some theoretical physicists (for example, authors of popular books such as Sean Carroll, Paul Davies, and Frank Wilczek) to follow the example of Albert Einstein and be in awe of nature and our ability to understand it. Unfortunately, they either deny the existence of God or at least his personal nature.

Love for others is particularly challenging as it includes love for enemies. A scholar may encounter many enemies (both real and perceived): colleagues who oppose their ideas, anonymous reviewers who make unjustified criticisms, bureaucrats who frustrate, impede, and burden with dubious administrative requirements, and increasingly members of the public or politicians who make ill-informed criticisms of their work, its value, or its applications.  

The concern for love enlivened a liturgy (from Every Moment Holy) that I often pray before commencing work. Here are a few lines 

“May I learn to love learning, O Lord,

for the world is yours,

and all things in it speak

-each in their way – of you:

of your mind,

your designs,

your artistry,

your power,

your unfolding purpose.

All knowledge is your knowledge.

All wisdom your wisdom….

Let me be in this school, even is small ways,

a bearer of love and light and reconciliation;

which is to say, let me in humility be your child…” 

Counter-cultural dimensions to love in the academy

The love commands of Jesus were counter-cultural in the first century. His followers were largely from the lower echelons of society and faced opposition from both Roman imperial and Jewish religious leaders. Obedience could come at a high cost. The commands are also radically counter-cultural in universities today, as they are dominated by four values: money, marketing, management, and metrics. The social and institutional pressure to conform is immense. In his Disciplinary Brief, responding to O’Donovan, Ian Hutchinson suggests “humility seems the most difficult value in the academy.” Peter Harrison recently discussed how, following the characterisations of Max Weber, secularisation has led to disenchantment, diminishment of virtue, and being trapped in the “iron cage” of bureaucracy. 

Tom McLeish argued that Christian natural scientists need to adopt a contemplative stance in their work.  He argued that the book of Job

“urges us not to look on the natural world for signs of God, nor through it as a window onto some dim divine image, but to learn to look on nature with God’s eyes, aligning our servant gaze with, not at, the divine. The same searching look of creative power and insight, of love, with which God participates in his created nature is to be the direction, if only in image, of our participation also.”

This resonates with O’Donovan’s definition of love as “affective and directive attention to a good.”

How might order and disorder shape scholarship?

 Order and Disorder: Nigel Biggar in Dialogue with the University, Edited By Terence C. Halliday and K. K. Yeo

has just been published by Langham.

In 1992, John Stott, the founder of Langham, made an “urgent plea for double listening” for Christians to listen to both the Word and the world. This book is a notable response to Stott’s plea, in the context of the highest levels of academia. There is an intellectual chasm between academic theology and the research that takes place in secular universities, even though the best ones have deeply Christian origins.

In this volume, Professor Nigel Biggar claims that the “existence of a given created order – be it physical or aesthetic or moral – implies that academic endeavour is properly about the discovery of the truth of reality as given by God.” However, given human finitude and fallibility, finding such truth is subtle, complex, multi-faceted, and ambiguous. Elucidating the nature and extent of the connections between theology and academic disciplines is a formidable multi-disciplinary challenge that must contend with overspecialisation, compartmentalisation, secularisation, institutional inertia, and political polarisation.

The Global Faculty Initiative (GFI) has developed a community and method that provides small concrete examples of how to make progress. Thanks be to God! This book is the wonderful fruit of their concerted labour and is the second in a series showcasing the work of GFI. Biggar provides a Theology Brief that elucidates the conceptual dialectic of order and disorder in creation to set the contour of a dialogue with Christian scholars from diverse academic disciplines. His Brief is succinct, accessible, balanced, profound, helpful, stimulating, and relevant. The responses are creative, concrete, stimulating, and gracious in disagreement and correction. Biggar’s final response is noteworthy: “We all learn from what should be a genuine dialogue. We all need to learn – non-theologians to think more Christianly, and theologians to think more realistically.”

Upon engaging with the book, my main disappointment was that I did not somehow make the time to contribute to the discussion. My own field of condensed matter physics is largely about how the interplay of order and disorder can lead to the emergence of hierarchical structures. Nevertheless, the book is a stimulus for future engagement with the ideas presented and with this vibrant alternative academic community. 

My articles on theology and science

Here are links to articles that I have written over the years on theology and science.

Can Science see the End?  Case Magazine, 2003, with Greg Clarke.

Foundations of the Dialogue between the Physical Sciences and Theology, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith  (2004).

Dialectical critical realism in science and theology: Quantum Physics and Karl Barth, Science and Christian Belief (2008), with Ben Myers.

Emergence, reductionism and the stratification of reality in science and theology, Scottish Journal of Theology (2011).

Emergence: The whole is greater than the sum of the parts, Test of Faith.

Science and theology in the non-Western world, Guest Editorial, Science and Christian Belief, 2012.

Living as a Physicist and a Christian, a chapter in the book, Why Study? Exploring the Face of God in the Academy, published by Singapore FES.

Towards a Christian vision for the modern secular university: A theological contribution to competing visions of the university, IFES Word and World, 2018. What is a university for? is a long version of the published article.

Who's afraid of social science?

CASE Magazine, 2019.

A Theology of Weakness,

Chapter  in Pub Theology: Where Potato Wedges and a Beer are a Eucharistic Experience

Blessed are the Meek: The Science and Theology of Humility, 

Chapter 3 in To Whom Shall We Go? Faith Responses in a Time of Crisis

Science, Humanity and Jesus, A talk at Theology on Tap Brisbane, June 2025.

Transformation in the Natural Sciences

Draft book chapter, September 2025

Karl Barth and the dialogue between theology and the sciences, Draft paper

A Disciplinary Brief for the Global Faculty Initiative, The Radicalness of Love—for the Natural Sciences and the Research University.

What is a university for?

A Christian Vision for the Modern Secular University

CASE Magazine, June 2026.

Science, Humanity, and Jesus

Theology on Tap in Brisbane recently celebrated its tenth anniversary.

On Sunday, June 8, I will give the next talk, on "Science, Humanity, and Jesus." Here is the abstract.

Cultural, political, economic, technological, and philosophical forces have been steadily eroding our humanity over the past few hundred years. Scientism is the notion that science has the answers to everything and has led to a reductionist, largely biological view of what it means to be human. With irony, I will give a scientific argument, using the concept of emergence, that the natural sciences are largely irrelevant for understanding our humanity. Emergence notes how reality is stratified and the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Instead of science, we need to look to the humanities, including theology for insights. Truth, justice, and beauty are irreducible and transcendent. Meaning and significance comes from human relationships where love, mercy, hope, forgiveness, and grief are central. Jesus is the ultimate embodiment of humanity and offers us the power to be truly human.

Location is Raven Hotel in West End. 

Flyer is here.

Here is a copy of the text and of the slides.

Lectures on Science and Christianity: Part 4

Part 4: Apologetics, mission, and the social sciences

1. Overview

2. Emergence and reductionism

3. Human sciences

4. Mental health

5. South Asian contexts 

6. Conclusion

A holistic perspective on liturgy and secularism

When discussing "religion" in the modern world there are many dichotomies: religion and science, sacred and secular, mystery and certainty, faith and reason, supernatural and natural, clergy and laity, transcendence and immanence, church and state.

Each of us and the communities that we belong to need to make sense of these dichotomies, as they have profound implications in ethics, education, politics, science, theology, and human flourishing.

I recently found the underlying philosophical issues, particularly about secularism, addressed profoundly by an unexpected source.

For the theology reading group this month we are reading

For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy by Alexander Schmemann

I find it very helpful that this group leads me to read authors and books that I would not normally. I grew up in the Anglo-Catholic tradition. In contrast, my church experience the past forty years has been "low" church. Most of these churches have been dismissive of liturgy and tradition, and have marginalised the Eucharist (holy communion) and any notion of a "sacramental" view of rites such as baptism, marriage, and ordination. I have also not been able to grasp the thinking behind those who are enthusiastic about Catholic and Orthodox traditions. Perhaps, I am just too practical and pragmatic. 

However, in the past few years I have come to appreciate liturgy through the Every Moment Holy and Celtic Daily Prayer books of liturgy.

I have been blessed by this book. It is amazing! It is not at all what I expected. 

First, Schmemann shares my concerns about the way that liturgy can take on a life on its own, be an escape from the "real" world, and lead to obscure and inane ideas and divisive debates about issues such as transubstantiation.

Second, significant parts of the book are about deep philosophical issues such as I raised in my introduction. His analysis of secularism is brilliant and insightful, and at least fifty years ahead of analysis today. Schmemann contends that secularism is a Christian heresy. This resonates with a view promoted more recently by Tom Holland and Brad Gregory.

Sacraments are not "miracles" but transformations.

A sacrament -...- is always a passage, a transformation. Yet it is not a “passage” into “supernature” but into the Kingdom of God, the world to come, into the very reality of this world and its life as redeemed and restored by Christ. It is the transformation not of “nature” into “supernature,” but of the old into the new. A sacrament therefore is not a “miracle” by which God breaks, so to speak, the “laws of nature,” but the manifestation of the ultimate Truth about the world and life, man and nature, the Truth which is Christ.

page 102

“This is my body, this is my blood. Take, eat, drink.…” And generations upon generations of theologians ask the same questions. How is this possible? How does this happen? And what exactly does happen in this transformation? And when exactly? And what is the cause? No answer seems to be satisfactory. 

This leads to a discussion of the problem with a reductionist approach to sacraments.

Symbol? But what is a symbol? Substance, accidents? Yet one immediately feels that something is lacking in all these theories, in which the Sacrament is reduced to the categories of time, substance, and causality, the very categories of “this world.” Something is lacking because the theologian thinks of the sacrament and forgets the liturgy. As a good scientist he first isolates the object of his study, reduces it to one moment, to one “phenomenon”—and then, proceeding from the general to the particular, from the known to the unknown, he gives a definition, which in fact raises more questions than it answers. 

But throughout our study the main point has been that the whole liturgy is sacramental, that is, one transforming act and one ascending movement. And the very goal of this movement of ascension is to take us out of “this world” and to make us partakers of the world to come. In this world—the one that condemned Christ and by doing so has condemned itself—no bread, no wine can become the body and blood of Christ. Nothing which is a part of it can be “sacralized.” 

True sacramentalism must go beyond a false dichotomy between sacred and secular. A false dichotomy is an fallacy that limits the possible options, reducing complex analysis to either/or choices and not leaving room for both/and or dialectic.

“to free the terms “sacramental” and “eucharistic” from the connotations they have acquired in the long history of technical theology, where they are applied almost exclusively within the framework of “natural” versus “supernatural,” and “sacred” versus “profane,” that is, within the same opposition between religion and life which makes life ultimately unredeemable and religiously meaningless.

Another example is the relationship between Word and sacrament.

“The sacrament is a manifestation of the Word. And unless the false dichotomy between Word and sacrament is overcome, the true meaning of both Word and sacrament, and especially the true meaning of Christian “sacramentalism” cannot be grasped in all their wonderful implications. The proclamation of the Word is a sacramental act par excellence because it is a transforming act. It transforms the human words of the Gospel into the Word of God and the manifestation of the Kingdom. And it transforms the man who hears the Word into a receptacle of the Word and a temple of the Spirit.…”

There is even emergence!

“the Greek word leitourgia. It meant an action by which a group of people become something corporately which they had not been as a mere collection of individuals—a whole greater than the sum of its parts. It meant also a function or “ministry” of a man or of a group on behalf of and in the interest of the whole community. Thus the leitourgia of ancient Israel was the corporate work of a chosen few to prepare the world for the coming of the Messiah. And in this very act of preparation they became what they were called to be, the Israel of God, the chosen instrument of His purpose.”

page 25

Beauty is important and should not be eliminated for reasons of functionality.

“Once more, the joyful character of the eucharistic gathering must be stressed. For the medieval emphasis on the cross, while not a wrong one, is certainly one-sided. The liturgy is, before everything else, the joyous gathering of those who are to meet the risen Lord and to enter with him into the bridal chamber. And it is this joy of expectation and this expectation of joy that are expressed in singing and ritual, investments and in censing, in that whole “beauty” of the liturgy which has so often been denounced as unnecessary and even sinful. 

Unnecessary it is indeed, for we are beyond the categories of the “necessary.” Beauty is never “necessary,” “functional” or “useful.” And when, expecting someone whom we love, we put a beautiful tablecloth on the table and decorate it with candles and flowers, we do all this not out of necessity, but out of love. And the Church is love, expectation and joy. It is heaven on earth,”

Faith is not just intellectual belief or assent to propositions. It is love, relational, and trust in Christ.

But faith itself is the acceptance not of this or that "proposition" about Christ, but of Christ Himself as the Life and the light of life. (I Jn. 1:2). 

In this sense Christian faith is radically different from "religious belief." Its starting point is not "believe" but love. In itself and by itself all belief is partial, fragmentary, fragile...  Only love never fails (I Cor. 13). And if to love someone means that I have my life in him, or rather that he has become the "content" of my life, to love Christ is to know and to possess Him as the Life of my life. 

(p.104-105)

Remembering Tom McLeish

I was very sad to hear that Tom McLeish died of cancer at the end of February. He was an extraordinary person, scientist, and Christian. Tom can been characterised as a polymath or a "renaissance man". He modeled an integrated life, as a Christian, a scientist, and a member of a university community. He showed what universities should be about and can be about, in stark contrast to what they have become [fragmented, commercialised, and micro-managed]. 

A small measure of Tom's influence on me is that there are eight posts on my science blog about his work and another seven posts on this blog.

Tom's academic career is briefly sketched in an obituary from the University of York, where for the last few years he held a position, created for him, Professor of Natural Philosophy in the physics department. Tom was best known in the scientific community for his work on the theory of soft matter, for which he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. I highly recommend his Very Short Introduction on the subject. But the influence and recognition of his intellectual contributions go far beyond his work on soft matter. For example, after the publication of The Poetry and Music of Science: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art by Oxford University Press in 2019, the following year the journal Interdisciplinary Science Reviews devoted a whole issue to seven different reviews of the book, with a response from Tom. 

Tom was a trustee of the John Templeton Foundation and was very supportive of the IFES Logos and Cosmos Initiative that the foundation funded and I am very involved in. He gave me valuable advice about many elements of this program and spoke at several training workshops. Participants have benefitted significantly from his books and talks about theology and the sciences.

David Bentley Hart has written a moving tribute to Tom. It contains a beautiful description of Tom's final days trusting in Christ, written by his wife. Tom was a model to me in life and in death.  

My condolences to Tom's family, friends, and colleagues. He died much too young and will be sorely missed.

Lessons from the ants for the Christian church

6 

 Go to the ant, you sluggard;  consider its ways and be wise!

It has no commander, no overseer or ruler,

yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest.

    Proverbs 6:6-8

Ant colonies are amazing. It is incredible what they can achieve. I love the video below. It highlights how complex structures and functions emerge in an ant colony even though there is no individual directing the whole operation. The colony can achieve much more than individual ants acting independently of one another.

Ant colonies are fascinating from a scientific point of view, particularly as they are a model for the concept of emergence. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Here, I explore how scientific observations about ant colonies might inspire followers of Jesus as they reflect on the church, its mission, its corporate character, being the body of Christ, and the living presence of God in the world.

Humans do not rule the world. Ants do! They have colonised every continent. There are more than ten thousand trillion ants on the planet. Their total body mass is comparable to that of the eight billion humans on earth. There are more than sixteen thousand different species of ant. Their survival, expansion, and impressive achievements are not the result of heroic gifted individuals, charismatic leaders, benevolent dictators, advanced technology, or great intelligence.

Rather the global success of ants results from cooperative action and individual self-sacrifice. It is not just a matter of strength in numbers. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Observations by entomologists and mathematical models show that it is through the synergy of cooperation that a colony produces new structures, functions, and achievements. These are qualitatively different from what is possible for a small number of ants. Each ant has a job to do. They just get on with it, cooperating with others in their immediate neighbourhood, and acting for the greater common good. 

Individual ants have limited abilities. Each ant has a specialist task. A colony is composed of several distinct classes of workers (castes): soldiers, excavators, foragers, garbage collectors, and gardeners. 

Ants are simple small animals. They have poor hearing and sight. They have limited ability to communicate. They use a few signals based on touch, but mostly communicate by producing trails of distinct chemicals (pheromones).  

Discoveries about ant colonies are leading biologists to rethink individuality and its role in the survival of a community. Individual ants do not seem to have "selfish genes". That is, they do not act in a manner oriented towards preserving their individual genetic lineage. Ants have a sacrificial existence. They appear to have no self-interest. They do not compete with one another. They have unwavering loyalty to their queen and to the preservation of the colony that she has given birth to. Some biologists refer to the colony as a superorganism.

No analogy is perfect. All models are wrong, but some are useful. Nevertheless, I think it is worth asking what lessons Christians might draw from the science of ant colonies? The author of proverbs would affirm such contemplation. The properties and workings of the created order may reflect important truths about how God wants his people to live.

A Biblical metaphor for the church is that of the Body of Christ. The body has many members. Each of these members has a special function and contribution to make. These members are to work together for the good of the whole body. There are many different gifts and abilities. No gift or individual is to be valued or elevated more than another. The weak are indispensable.

Humans are a lot smarter and stronger than ants! We have vastly more capabilities than ants. But, just like ants, individual Christians are not exceptional. They are finite and have limited abilities and strength. Paul pointed out to the Corinthian church their own severe limitations.

Not many [of you] were wise from a human perspective, not many powerful, not many of noble birth. Instead, God has chosen what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen what is weak in the world to shame the strong.  (1 Corinthians 1:26-27)

Christians are to have an undying loyalty to their King, Jesus. Followers of Jesus are to live sacrificially. Jesus said

“If anyone wants to follow after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life because of me will save it." (Luke 9:23,24)

Paul exhorted the church in Rome to live sacrificially, considering themselves as one body made of many parts, and to exercise the gifts God had given each of them. 

in view of the mercies of God, I urge you to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God; this is your true worship. ...I tell everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he should think... Now as we have many parts in one body, and all the parts do not have the same function, in the same way we who are many are one body in Christ and individually members of one another. (Romans 12:1-8) 

Paul continues identifying specific gifts: prophecy, service, teaching, exhortation, giving, leading, and showing mercy. Each member of the body should use that gift. Paul expressed similar ideas to the church in Ephesus.

[God] gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, to build up the body of Christ, ...let us grow in every way into him who is the head—Christ. From him the whole body, fitted and knit together by every supporting ligament, promotes the growth of the body for building itself up in love by the proper working of each individual part. (Ephesians 4:11-16)

Paul told the Philippians that it would bring him great joy if they had the same attitude as Christ,

thinking the same way, having the same love, united in spirit, intent on one purpose. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility consider others as more important than yourselves. Everyone should look not to his own interests, but rather to the interests of others. (Philippians 2:2-4)

Both the behaviour of ants and these Biblical exhortations are in stark contrast to the ways and values of the modern capitalist world. It worships the individual, promotes the rights of the individual, and motivates individuals with money, punishments, and the promise of celebrity.

Christians and the organisations that they start have a limited life span. People die. Even excellent institutions do not last forever, particularly in terms of having enduring relevance and impact. The goal of members of the Body of Christ is that during each of our lifetimes we should use our limited abilities and work together so that the community of our King endures forever. Ant colonies illustrate how with collective action and self-sacrifice much more can be achieved than through small numbers of independent individuals. Christians need to consider the ways of the ants. They can give us wisdom.  This may lead us together to achieve "far more than we can ask or imagine."

Transformation in theology and mission

“I am making everything new!” 

So proclaims the One who sits on the throne as a new heaven and earth come into being (Revelation 21:5).  The Apostle Paul proclaims (2 Corinthians 5:17):

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! 

The concept of transformation is central to the grand narrative of the Bible. God transforms bondage to freedom, hate to love, alienation to relationship, lost to found, poor to rich, darkness to light, infidelity to faithfulness, injustice to righteousness, and death to life. God has transformed, is transforming, and will transform individuals, families, communities, churches, and nations. The Kingdom of God is all about transformation.

Transformation is qualitative change. The new state is qualitatively different from the old state. It has a quality that the old state did not have.

For several decades my fellow "holy" scribbler, Charles Ringma, has taught a course on Transformational Theology at seminaries in Australia, Canada, and Asia. He recently reflected on this experience, noting dimensions that students struggled with, and raised several important questions about transformational theology. This has stimulated the following post, which mostly reflects on what the social sciences might contribute to this discussion. Here I bring my perspective as a condensed matter physicist with an enduring interest in complex systems and the concept of emergence. I start with several claims (presuppositions) to justify why this perspective is possible and may be useful.

There is a dialectic between our actions and the work of God in the world. We live in a material world that functions in certain ways. The book of Proverbs is all about discerning wisdom: how the world actually works (the physical and moral order) and living accordingly. Acting according to wisdom or folly will produce good or bad outcomes, respectively. This world is both created and fallen, good and bad, of great potential and fundamentally flawed. We are constrained to live and act in this world. We are creatures living in a creation. We have autonomy but are constrained. 

God is sovereign, the Holy Spirit is always working, and God does do miracles (events outside the normal pattern of regularity, such as raising Jesus from the dead, speaking to people's hearts and souls, causing nations to rise and fall). But, arguably most of the time God acts through normal processes associated with human action (speaking, loving, serving, listening, planning, ...). Even God's acts of judgment on Israel and other nations were performed through human agents such as Assyria and Babylon.

If we are concerned with mission as transformation, i.e., acting in ways that promote the transformation that God desires, then we need to observe and learn how the world actually does function. This reality both creates possibilities and imposes constraints. The material world behaves according to the laws of nature, that physics, chemistry, and biology, aim to encode. Are there "laws" of transformation? How does transformation occur in individuals, families, institutions, communities, and nations?

Charles noted that

Many students worked on the assumption that if we get our theology right (orthodoxy) then good strategies and practices will follow in impacting others and our world.

This reflects a common problem that people too often have implicit beliefs (i.e., unstated assumptions that are embedded in a particular worldview or life experience). In this case implicit beliefs about how transformation happens.

Today we know more about answers to the last question above than we ever have before. Scholars in history, sociology, political science, anthropology, and psychology have greatly increased our understanding. This does not mean that we have complete understanding or that all the scholarship in these fields is reliable or sympathetic to the values of the Kingdom of God. But, there is much we can learn from this scholarship to aid us in our journey to partner with God in transformational mission. 

A significant idea is emergence: the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Emergence is one of the most important scientific concepts developed in the second half of the twentieth century. It is relevant to physical, biological, human, and social sciences. The possible relevance of emergence to mission has recently been explored in detail by Darren Duerksen and William Dyrness in a recent book, Seeking Church: Emerging Witnesses to the Kingdom. They draw on work by the sociologist Christian Smith. In a recent talk I explored some of these ideas.

An emergent perspective considers a specific entity that we wish to see transformed, whether a human individual or an oppressed community, as a system that is composed of many interacting parts and that, is embedded in an environment of external components. For example, a human individual is not a disembodied spirit but a combination of mind, heart, body, and soul. Furthermore, a person is never an isolated entity but interact with a social network of family, friends, and community, which in turn is embedded in a nation-state and a global economy. If we wish to see an individual come to faith in Christ or to experience healing from trauma, we may need to consider the role of many of these interacting components.

Charles noted that

The greatest overall weakness in papers for the transformation theology course was the treatment of synchronicity. Religious, social, economic, and other factors usually have to combine to bring about significant change. Students tended to operate on the basis that only religious factors were needed.

The characteristics of emergence are as follows. Due to the interactions between the components of the system, new entities can emerge.  The whole system can have properties that are qualitatively different from (and not reducible to) the properties of the individual components. A brain is conscious but a single neuron is not. A dead body has no morality but a living person does. Water is wet but a single water molecule is not. New entities that emerge may be desirable (e.g., a just society or a flourishing church in a slum) or they may not be (e.g., a stock-market crash or a church that becomes a personal empire). Christian Smith, refers to these emergent entities as relational goods and relational evils, respectively.

Quantitative change can lead to qualitative change. Changing the temperature of the water in the pipes from plus one degree Celsius to minus one degree Celsius will lead to the water undergoing a transition from the liquid to the solid state, i.e., freezing and expanding, and bursting your water pipes. Last year in Chile, a 30-peso (four-cent) rise in the price of peak-hour metro tickets led to social upheaval and a plan to write a new constitution for the country.

Emergent phenomena are hard to predict, even for simple physical systems where scientists have an excellent knowledge of the components and their interactions. Hence, it should not be surprising that it is very hard to predict how society and the economy will behave. For example, economists cannot agree on an answer to the simple question, "Can government "stimulus" spending actually prevent an economic recession?"

Central to describing and understanding emergent phenomena are a range of scales in time, space, and numbers of components. For example, transformation of a society can be viewed at the scale of individuals, families, neighbourhoods, cities, and nations. Insight and discernment are required to decide which of these scales may be most significant, and thus key to our understanding and action.

I now give a specific example to illustrate how emergent phenomena are hard to predict and often surprising. 

The emergence of social segregation

Many churches are very homogeneous with regard to the demographics of members. Many Christians do not have many non-Christian friends? Why is that?Segregation is a common social phenomenon: groups of people clump together in spatial regions (or relational connectivity) with those similar to them. Like attracts like. Examples range from ethnic ghettos and teenage cliques to "echo chambers" on the internet.

In 1971 Thomas Schelling published a landmark paper in the social sciences. The motivation for his work was to understand how racially segregated neighbourhoods emerged in cities in the USA, but the ideas are applicable to a wide range of phenomena. Schelling's work surprised many because using a simple model he showed how small individual preferences for similarity can lead to large-scale segregation. 

A major conclusion is that motives at the individual level are not the same as the outcomes at the macro level.  This idea provided the title for an influential book Micromotives and Macrobehavior, that Schelling published in 1978.  People may be very tolerant of diversity (e.g. only have a preference that 30 per cent of their neighbours be like them) but collectively this results in them living in very segregated neighbourhoods.

Practical implications for transformative mission

An emergent perspective should lead to humility. It emphasises how much we do not understand rather than deluding ourselves that we do understand what we are doing and what the outcome will be.

The systems we are interested in, communities of people, are complex. They are hard to describe, understand, and predict. Yet, many of us, and the organisations that we are involved in, have a simple mechanical view of these systems and how transformation will happen. Study at this seminary and you will become a successful pastor. Give money to this family in the slum and it will lift them out of poverty. Preach the Gospel and people will become disciples of Jesus. Elect Christian politicians and society will become more Christian.

Humility means a willingness to learn from others: community members, non-Christian social scientists, team members, and those with a different perspective than our own.

Humility should lead to realistic expectations about the likely outcomes from our actions. On the one hand, we want to proceed by faith that God will do great things "far more than we can ask or imagine." On the other hand, we are constrained by our ignorance, limited resources, and the fallen nature of our world. Suppose, we proceed with the hubris that we actually know what we are doing and that our actions must produce the outcome that we naively believe will follow. Except by the mercy and generosity of God, our efforts will "fail" because they go against the way that the world actually works. This will lead to disappointment, disillusionment, and despair. Countless activists have been burnt out and quit and organisations collapsed because they had unrealistic expectations and did not see the outcomes that they assumed would happen. A humble emergent perspective can lead to a long-term view that makes initiatives sustainable, both at the individual and institutional level.

Most complex systems are adaptive. In response to perturbations, they adapt and re-organise. This is the basis of the law of unintended consequences. Organisations need to be adaptive. One approach is Action Research where action leads to reflection which leads to action.

An emergent perspective on transformation is against the common narrative that great leaders are heroic individuals who have the vision and know the strategy and tactics to get there. As they are immersed in their surrounding corporate culture most Christian organisations embrace this view of leadership. The origins of this narrative are not Biblical but rather the theory of management that arose from the military success of the USA in World War II and of the auto industry in the following two decades. Two experts on organisational development, Gervase Bushe and Robert Marshak, state that

The “visionary leader” narrative and performance mindset that predominate in theories and practices of “Change Leadership” are no longer effective in an environment of multi-dimensional diversity marked by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.

Instead, they advocate an alternative leadership model that starts from the perspective that organisations are emergent and their behaviour is hard to control and predict. Leaders need to find ways to harness the self-organisational and adaptive tendency of organisations. This might be done by influencing the conversations that take place within the organisation, encouraging employees to come up with their own solutions to problems, and creating a culture and structures that are sensitive to the tension between efficiency and innovation.

Obviously, this emergent perspective on leadership and organisational development has important implications for how any organisation selects and promotes leaders, how those leaders act, and what policies and procedures are embraced.

How might Christians respond to poverty?

 On the one hand, the world has never been so wealthy and prosperous as it is today. On the other hand, it has never been so unequal. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Billions live on a few dollars per day. The covid-19 pandemic has made this fragile existence even more tenuous and has pushed hundreds of millions more into poverty. Poverty is not just material but also involves limited access to education, health, social networks, and political representation. There are also psychological and spiritual dimensions to poverty.

Addressing global poverty has become a massive billion-dollar "industry", for better or worse, involving governments, philanthropists, NGOs, universities, and researchers. Yet, the effectiveness of this industry in alleviating poverty is contentious.  

The Bible, from beginning to end, says a lot about poverty, wealth, inequality, injustice, and caring for the marginalised. Hence, addressing these issues should be central to the mission of the global church. But, this is a complex issue as it involves theological, political, economic, social, and cultural dimensions. 

A helpful place to begin is the book, When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor and Yourself, by Brian Fikkert and Steve Corbett. They state

one of the biggest problems in many poverty-alleviation efforts is that their design and implementation exacerbates the poverty of being of the economically rich—their god-complexes—and the poverty of being of the economically poor—their feelings of inferiority and shame.

There is also an excellent small group guide with videos that my wife and I have used with a church small group.

For those who want to go deeper, either because they are academically oriented or are practitioners, there is a "textbook".

Walking with the Poor: Principles and Practices of Transformational Development by Bryant L. Myers

Myers worked for World Vision for many years and now teaches at Fuller Seminary. It is comprehensive, balanced, easy to read, and has helpful diagrams. There are many things I like about the book.

Integral mission

"The Christian message is an embodied message, carried by living witnesses." Word, deed, and sign cannot be separated. Poverty alleviation and gospel proclamation are both acts of love that go together. Transformational development has spiritual, relational, and material dimensions. It is central to the Kingdom of God.

Bringing together theology, social science, and activism

Activism and programs need to be informed by both social sciences and by theology. Activism receives motivation and direction from theology, being informed by a Biblical worldview.  That provides a framework to understand who humans are, how they act, and how they change. The themes of creation, fall, incarnation, redemption, and re-creation are central. 

Poverty occurs in a social context. A community is "disturbed" by any outside intervention or internal initiative that aims to reduce poverty. Social sciences can be useful in understanding social structures and dynamics, including designing and evaluating the impact of any program.

A compact overview of state-of-the-art thinking and practice on development

There is a huge academic literature on development, from both Christian and secular, Western and Majority World perspectives. 

Myers provides a succinct introduction to the ideas of Jeffrey Sachs, William Easterly, Paul Collier, Banerjee and Duflo, Muhammad Yunus, Amartya Sen, ...

There are methods for planning, implementing, monitoring, and evaluation of projects. These include The Logical Framework (logframe), Participatory Learning and Action, Appreciative Inquiry, and Positive Deviance. They are all introduced and critically evaluated.

Sensitive to culture and context

Most poverty alleviation programs are led and funded by WWWs (Wealthy White Westerners) but implemented in Majority World contexts that are not WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialised Rich Democratic). Given the hubris that too often goes with money, power, and education (a god-complex) it is hardly surprising that many programs fail, particularly in the long term, because of a lack of understanding and sensitivity to local culture such as social structures, values, methods of communication, ...

The modern Western worldview presupposes dichotomies between the spiritual and material. The figure below shows pairings of categories, such as religion and science, faith and reason. These pairs are assumed to be in conflict or completely independent of one another. These dichotomies are often presupposed by Western Christians. But, they are not part of a Biblical worldview.

Postmodernism does not accept these dichotomies, and rightly points out they are naive. For example, faith and reason can never be separated, either for a Christian or an atheist. Everyone starts with some presuppositions. Rationality takes place in the context of a particular tradition, as emphasised by Alisdair MacIntyre.

Myers draws on ideas from the anthropologist, Paul Hiebert, who contrasts modern and traditional worldviews, illustrated below. A key idea is that of the "excluded middle" in the modern worldview: there is no room for forces and phenomena that bridge the spiritual and seen world. 

This presents a problem for development initiatives in communities with a traditional worldview; this excluded middle that may be seen to determine health, prosperity, natural disasters, and conflicts. Hence, a community will not be receptive to technical "solutions" that are presented by Westerners.

Treats the poor with dignity  

The poor and non-poor are all made in the image of God. They are of equal value in God's eyes. Hence, the poor should be valued, respected, celebrated, enjoyed, empowered, and listened to. 

Myers reviews social science research that shows that the poor actually know a lot more than they are often given credit for. They are incredibly resilient. It is a miracle how they manage to survive and persevere. Myers describes the work of the Peruvian economist, Hernando de Soto who "demonstrated the vitality, creativity, and entrepreneurial activity of Peru's urban poor." However, this positive energy is significantly constrained because they are required to operate in the informal (underground) economy which means they do not have protections from the rule of law or the property titles that others use to access capital. 

Discussion of complexity theory and emergence

Communities are composed of many interacting units (individuals, families, businesses, churches, ...) that are embedded in an environment (e.g. a city and the global economy). For such complex systems, it is hard to predict how they will behave, including in response to a "perturbation". Hence, the concept of emergence and ideas from complexity theory can provide some insight into development.

Principles are relevant to other Majority World issues

The focus of the book is on poverty alleviation, particularly extreme poverty in the Majority World. However, most of the principles (theological and social scientific) and practices are relevant to any initiative of a Christian organisation that aims to have a transformative influence in a community. Part of my interest in the book is because it addresses many issues that we face in the IFES Logos and Cosmos Initiative.

If you want to know more about the book you can download the Table of Contents and Chapter 1. The latter provides a nice overview of the book, introducing some of the key ideas, and describing how it came to be written.

Finding order in the chaos of life

Life in this world often seems to be chaotic. Think of your experience of the weather, the economy, politics, and human relationships. It is hard to predict what will happen next. We yearn for order and sometimes seem to be able to create little oases of it, only to see them slip from our grasp. Sometimes things even seem to make sense; much of the time they don't. 

On the other hand, some claim there is a grand plan for the universe and it is all pre-determined. We just follow our destiny.

What is the relationship between order and chaos? Is the universe random or deterministic? Scientists have wrestled with these questions for centuries. How might different scientific views related to how the Bible addresses (or not) these questions?

I have enjoyed re-reading,  Let There Be Science: Why God Loves Science, and Science Needs God, by David Hutchings and Tom McLeish. This week we are discussing it in the theology reading group.  I think that this is the best introductory book I have encountered about the relationship between theology and science.

The questions above are nicely discussed in Chapter 6, entitled Order from Chaos. Here are some highlights.

chaotic systems are both predictable and random (p. 115)

The probabilistic approach shows us that order really can emerge from disorder (p. 118)

Theoretically predictable systems (can) collapse into randomness. Theoretically random systems coalesce into predictability. 

Is the future knowable, or not? It seems that science gives a rather unscientific answer: “sort of”. (p. 119)

Some related issues are discussed in posts I wrote a while back. 

The collective activity of many randomly moving actors can be effectively predictable, even if individual motions are not.

Random dynamics at one level can lead to deterministic dynamics at a higher level, and visa versa.

True randomness requires design. This is illustrated by the fact that it is very hard to make random number generators that are truly random.

Job struggled with the chaos of life. He lived a morally ordered life, yet he experienced chaos, reflected in his great suffering. He ranted at God.

Even if I summoned him and he responded, 

I do not believe he would give me a hearing. 

He would crush me with a storm and multiply my wounds for no reason. 

Job 9:16-17

In a development that is both surprising and entirely fitting, God does indeed respond to Job, speaking to him and his four counsellors from within a storm. This is our first clue that there may be far more to the apparent randomness of nature than Job had brought to his argument. (p. 122)

Job is being invited into a new way of thinking. God will push him to examine things afresh. Could it be that randomness and overall divine care can walk hand in hand somehow? (p. 122) 

God goes on to take full responsibility for the processes Job has raged about, but he suggests that Job has misunderstood the situation badly: 

Have you entered the storehouses of the snow or seen the storehouses of the hail, which I reserve for times of trouble, for days of war and battle?  

What is the way to the place where the lightning is dispersed, or the place where the east winds are scattered over the earth? 

Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain, and a path for the thunderstorm, to water a land where no one lives, an uninhabited desert, to satisfy a desolate wasteland and make it sprout with grass?

                     Job 38:22-27 

Here, God turns Job’s argument on its head. These events do not show a lack of control; they are actually how God brings about his plans. Job has seen them as individual, one-off uncertainties. He has seen them as uncontrolled events which terrorize mankind. God, though, is saying that they are not isolated instances at all; he is painting a bigger picture. The apparent randomness on the smaller scale is combining to form the order which emerges for creation as a whole. Job’s field of vision is far too narrow. God is telling him to widen it. (p. 123)

The authors then allude to some of the scientific research that McLeish has been involved in.

The mystery was solved when it was realized that billions of bumbling peptides had managed to glue themselves together into tapes. Their rapid, erratic motion was crucial to this: only by crashing around haphazardly would they eventually build up any kind of emergent structure. 

 The result of all this “randomness” is the formation of cell walls, the maintenance of correct chemical concentrations, overwhelming victories for the immune system and more. It is from within all the chaos that overall order is formed – and life exists.  

This video illustrates this with a computer simulation of an HIV virus capsid being surrounding by a drug, taken from this paper.

Modern scientists have learned that randomness and predictability are two sides of the same coin. (p. 124-5)

If our world was entirely random or entirely predictable, life as we know it would not be possible, and we could have no hope of any meaningful interaction with either nature or its Creator. 

We are told in the Bible that God has made it neither of these: he is found in both the chaos of the storm and the certainty of his love. (p. 125)

An integrated perspective on life

Yesterday was a public holiday, known as Australia Day. January 26 marks the arrival of British settlers in 1788. It has been suggested that the day should be called Invasion Day. Since the British settlement, the indigenous people have suffered immensely from numerous atrocities. Unfortunately, much suffering continues today. With regard to health, poverty, education, substance abuse, incarceration, and discrimination, there are massive gaps between the indigenous and non-indigenous populations. For Christians, this suffering presents a significant challenge. We are to pursue reconciliation, justice, and mercy.

On the eve of January 26, my family attended an excellent (virtual) event, #ChangeTheHeart, organised by Common Grace. You can watch it here.

I want to note something that I found striking: the integrated perspective about life held by indigenous communities. My new awareness reflects (ashamedly) my ignorance. Different cultures have different values, traditions, and ways of thinking and doing. It is fascinating and helpful to have the privilege of having a window into other cultures. It can make us more self-aware of our own culture, including our own biases, prejudices, and assumptions. For those who follow Jesus, this is particularly important because the Kingdom of God transcends all cultures. Unfortunately, Christian institutions and individuals (including me) have a very checkered history of conflating their own culture with Christianity.

Over more than 65,000 years Aboriginal people developed a strong affinity for the land, sensitivity to the rhythms of nature, and a strong sense of history, extended family, community, and spirituality. In almost every sense these orientations go against the values of modern Western society which is oriented around capitalism, individualism, the future, rationalism, technology, and secularism.

Indigenous communities have an integrated view of life, that developed over hundreds of generations. They do not separate economics, politics, ethics, law, community, and the environment. This holistic perspective is something that the Western world is very slowly coming to awareness of. One concrete example is the push for ESG investing, where investments are not made solely on the basis of profit but bring Environmental, Social, and corporate Governance criteria into investment decisions. The covid-19 pandemic has accentuated a general awareness of the interconnectedness of things, such as public health, the economy, government, business, and education. Most essential workers are paid minimum wages! We are not completely isolated independent autonomous individuals who determine our own destiny. Our well being is very dependent on that of others.

I look forward to learning more and hope and pray that Australia will seek reconciliation with and justice for the original custodians of the land that we now call Australia.

Emergence in science, theology, and mission

Emergence is one of the most important concepts in the sciences, both natural and social. I have also found it to be fruitful in engaging with questions relating to theology and mission. 

Tonight I am giving a talk on the subject for a session of the Write conference of The Simeon Network. It was canceled earlier this year and is now being held online. 

Here is the current version of the slides.

A gentle introduction is in a short article I wrote for Test of Faith.

A longer academic article is Emergence, reductionism and the stratification of reality in science and theology.

Last year I wrote a blog post about Emergence of Sin by Matthew Croasmun. A helpful review is at Marginalia: LA Review of Books.

Update. A complete video of the talk is below. The introduction is by Professor Peter Gill.

What is Religion? What is Science? How might they be related?

Peter Harrison has beautifully demonstrated that answers to these questions have changed significantly over the past few hundred years in the Western world, with reference to Christianity and the natural sciences. Harrison’s book, The Territories of Science and Religion, based on his Gifford lectures, has generated considerable interest. 

 

Similar issues of ambiguity and Western bias become even greater in South Asian contexts. This is nicely summarised below by Darren Duerksen and William Dyrness in a recent book, 

Seeking Church: Emerging Witnesses to the Kingdom, which builds on field research by Duerksen, and engages concepts of emergence from the social sciences, that I will also discuss below. The quote is long but I include it because it highlights such a fundamental issue.

 

Defining religion is similar to the proverbial problem of defining time—it seems self-evident until one actually tries to put words to it. But for all the various definitions of religion—and there are many—there are at least two things upon which contemporary scholars agree. The first, as scholars such as Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Clifford Geertz, and J. Z. Smith have suggested, is the idea that religion was, and to some degree continues to be, a concept that comes from outside of religions themselves and does not adequately describe various religious traditions. As Richard King has noted, early Greco-Roman uses of the concept referred to ritual practices and paying homage to the gods. With the rise of Christianity, however, it was redefined as “a matter of adherence to particular doctrines or beliefs rather than allegiance to ancient ritual practices.” This model tends to emphasize a theistic belief and a “fundamental dualism between the human world and the transcendent world.” Such conceptions reflected particular ways of understanding the Christian religion in the West but did not and do not always adequately describe the religions of other contexts.

The second area of agreement is that the idea of “world religions” is also largely a Western concept born out of the Enlightenment and responds to the need to make sense of a changing world. As Tomoko Masuzawa demonstrates in her influential book The Invention of World Religions, until the mid-nineteenth century Europeans and North Americans typically described the world as made up of Christians, Jews, Muhammadans (Muslims), and the rest. Western affinities for taxonomy began to be more specific about “the rest” in subsequent decades, …

What this required, however, was to somehow define and order in Western and Christian terms that which often defied categorization. An important example is the “religion” of Hinduism. As H. L. Richard and others have shown, historically the non-Muslims of the Indian continent did not understand themselves as sharing a common set of beliefs and practices known as Hinduism, much less call themselves Hindus. In the eighteenth century onward, however, and particularly through interaction with British Christian colonialists and missionaries, Britons and then Indians started to categorize the widely ranging traditions of the subcontinent as an identifiable religion.

This signals an important point that we intend to explore in this book— that from a social science perspective the category of religion itself is an elastic concept and is not as self-evident as is often assumed.

What Big Questions might we ask?

Last week I watched a fascinating Virtual Veritas Forum, Coronavirus and Quarantine: What Big Questions can we be asking?



It brings together a range of perspectives. My only concern is that it is very USA-centric.

Springboarding off that discussion, here are some questions I hope will receive attention in the coming years.
A fascinating and challenging aspect of these questions is that they need to be addressed with multi-faceted and multi-disciplinary approaches. The crisis brings together issues that span microbiology, public health, mathematical modeling, psychology, sociology, economics, politics, ethics, philosophy, and theology.
Many of the questions need to be asked and discussed at multiple scales; e.g., by individuals, institutions, cities, nations, and globally.

Some of the questions have been grappled with by many smart people and societies for decades or even millennia. But, broader modern society often does not discuss them.

I list the questions in random order.

How do epidemics start, spread, and end?

How do we manage risk, balancing near certainties and ignorance?

How do governments balance the ``common good'' with protecting individual freedoms?

How do you balance medical, financial, economic, and social considerations in allocating resources to patients?

When is the ``medicine'' worse than the ``disease''?

How do you balance the future needs of the young with the current needs of the elderly?

Will the current chaos and uncertainty in the Western world make us more empathetic and willing to learn from those in the Majority World who live with such calamities on a regular basis?

What do such events reveal about human nature: values, morality, mortality, rationality, relationality?

How do you balance fear, despair, lament, hope, optimism?

Why does God allow suffering?

In what sense are calamities such as this a reflection of God's judgement? or of God's mercy?

What are appropriate responses (from the theological to the practical) of Christians to events such as this?

Why are we so afraid of death?

I welcome your own questions.

Embracing contradictions

This month for the theology reading group we are looking at The Presence of the Kingdom by Jacques Ellul.
I was keen to read an Ellul book because of interest stimulated by a devotional book, that springboards off Ellul, that had a big influence on me. [The book is written by Charles Ringma who hosts the theology reading group.].

Many, including Ellul himself, consider this is the first Ellul book that people should read.
The second edition has a very helpful introduction by Daniel Clendenin.
He states ``Perhaps the single most important factor for Ellul interpretation is an understanding of his passionate adherence to dialectic".
Ellul states ``dialectic is a procedure that does not exclude contraries, but includes them.''
Here Ellul's approach has similarities to that of two large influences on his thinking: Karl Marx in sociology and Karl Barth in theology.
Ellul states that in the Bible, ``we constantly see two contradictory, apparently irreconcilable things affirmed, and we are told that they always meet to wind up in a new situation.'' Concrete and important examples include the following:

• God is beyond time and history. But he enters both through the incarnation of Jesus.
• We live in the ``Now but Not Yet'' of the Kingdom.
• Salvation is by grace alone but cannot be divorced from works.

There are also many others in the teachings of Jesus, such as ``the first will be last; the last will be first.''

Ellul presents a dialectic of social reality, where tension exists in five ways:

• ideology versus reality
• action and consequences
• the whole and the parts    [cf. emergence!]
• social and spiritual
• radical ambivalence of action

Sociology and theology present a critical counterpoint (dialogue partner) for one another.
Here there are certain parallels to John Stott's concept of  ``double listening.''

Theology books to read in 2020

I am blessed by being in a theology reading group that meets each month. We are about to discuss what books we might read and discuss next year. Here is my rough list of suggestions, roughly in order of preference. An almost common theme is the interaction of theology with the social sciences.

The Gospel in a Pluralist Society
Lesslie Newbigin

The Presence of the Kingdom 
Jacques Ellul

Sociology through the eyes of faith
David A. Fraser and Tony Campolo

Seeking Church: Emerging Witnesses to the Kingdom 
Darren T. Duerksen and William A. Dyrness

Transformative religious experience: a phenomenological understanding of religious conversion
Joshua Iyadurai

The Gospel in Dostoyevsky: Selections from His Works 
Alternatively read one of his novels.
J.I. Packer claimed, ``Dostoyevsky is to me both the greatest novelist, as such, and the greatest Christian storyteller, in particular, of all time.''

Surviving the State, Remaking the Church: A Sociological Portrait of Christians in Mainland China
Li Ma and Jin Li

Absence of Mind:The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self 
Marilynne Robinson
[The famous novelist discusses the relationship between science, religion, and consciousness].
[Based on her Terry lectures at Yale, available online].

Reason, Faith, and Revolution 
Terry Eagleton
The Marxist literary critic responds to the New Atheists.
[Based on his Terry lectures at Yale, available online].

Wouldn't You Love to Know? Trinitarian Epistemology and Pedagogy
Ian W. Payne

Emergence of Sin

Christian Mission in the Modern World
John Stott and Chris Wright

And for something different, listen to a piece of classical church music and discuss.
e.g. Elijah by Mendelson, The Creation by Hadyn, St. John's Passion by J.S. Bach.