Karla Pollmann, Professor of Classics and Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Kent, talks to Nigel Bovey about the influence of early Christian thinker Augustine of Hippo on contemporary thought.
Professor Pollmann, you have written four books and numerous academic papers about the early Church Father Augustine of Hippo, who was born in North Africa in the 4th century. What fascinates you about him?
Augustine is one of the craziest early Church Fathers. He is the person in antiquity we have most texts of and he has written on practically everything the world bothers about – love and sex, war and peace, manual labour, justice. He is an exceptional communicator and arguably the most influential early Christian thinker in the Western world.
An argument first formulated by a 14th century Franciscan friar born in a Surrey village is a central plank in the case against the existence of God by 21st century new atheists. William of Ockham, a major medieval philosopher, argued that when you are faced with competing theories to explain something, you should choose the simplest explanation. He phrased it in this way: ‘It is futile to do with more things that which can be done with fewer.’ The argument is known as Ockham’s razor, for its power to cut away complexity.
New atheists such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have used the argument to claim that modern science has done away with the need for God. In his book, The God Delusion, Dawkins says: ‘Historically, religion aspired to explain our own existence and...
Over the past month, these are the events in faith, science and culture that have been catching our attention.
23 August – VR Jesus may be coming to a screen near you soon, because previews of a hyper-immersive virtual reality movie about the life of Christ are to be screened at the Venice Film Festival in early September. The movie, entitled, Jesus VR – The Story of Christ will be one of the first feature length films to be shot in 360 degree format, and viewers will need to wear headsets to see it. Film director David Hansen says: ‘The viewers truly feel they are there with Jesus and his disciples. This is the most powerful story of all time and virtual reality is the perfect way to tell it.’ According to the Hollywood Reporter, ‘the film will release this Christmas on all major...
Roly Bain, a Church of England priest who was also a professional clown, died last week at the age of 62. He began his full time clown ministry in 1990 when he resigned as vicar of a church in Tooting and began his training at a circus school in Bristol. In his 26 years as a clown-priest, he took his act to schools, prisons, hospitals and cathedrals.
Christian Evidence supported his ministry for many years, which enabled us to see how much he was appreciated, especially in his prisons work. One prison chaplain said of his visit in 2007: ‘It was the first time any of our lads had experienced anything like this, and the way he expressed the gospel through clowning has made an outstanding impression on the prisoners who came.’
Revd Richard Burridge, Chair of the Christian Evidence...
In the early years of the 20th century, a new Sunday afternoon entertainment came to Hampstead Heath in north London. Atheist and free-thinking speakers were standing in the open air and delivering lectures to crowds which often numbered hundreds of heckling, cheering and fascinated people. A local clergyman who saw the crowds, Rev. Cyprian Drawbridge, noticed the speakers were preaching their messages without any response by Christian speakers. It wasn’t long before he ventured out of his pulpit and onto the Heath, armed with his own lecture notes.
As he said later, ‘It is often asked by our Christian critics, Why don’t more men go to church? May we venture to ask another question? Ought not the Christian church to go to the men?’
Over the past month, these are the events in faith, science and culture that have been catching our attention.
17 July – Brian Cox, physicist and broadcaster, made an interesting observation at the Starmus festival, which has just finished in Tenerife. The festival, which included Brian Eno, Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins, celebrated the synerygy between astronomy and music. Said Cox: ‘The fact that we’re in an insignificant physical speck in a possibly infinite universe is as easy or difficult to accept as that we are a very tiny temporal speck in a possibly infinite time span… But it’s a conversation that won’t be had by physicists. It’s a conversation that’s best had in art, philosophy, literature and theology. That’s where the meaning of the things we discover...
One of the most famous movies in history, Ben-Hur, has been remade and is due for worldwide release in September. Based on the 1880 novel by Lew Wallace, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, the new film re-imagines the novel for the big screen, although it will inevitably be compared with the 1959 epic movie starring Charlton Heston, which won 11 Academy awards.
The movie tells the story of Judah Ben-Hur (Jack Huston), a Jewish prince accused of insurrection against the Romans by his adopted brother Messala (Toby Kebbell), an officer serving under Pontius Pilate. Judah becomes a slave on a Roman galley, but eventually triumphs in a chariot race with Messala, a sequence which is ‘truly the crown jewel of the film,’ according to Timur Bekmambetov, the director. His life is changed by a...
Is the universe that produced us just a result of a chance roll of the cosmic dice?
Justin Brierley, the presenter of the radio apologetics debate show Unbelievable? demonstrates in a new video, posted this week, that it would have taken a gigantic streak of good luck to roll the dice so the universe would produce life. So gigantic, in fact, that the chances of it happening are 1 in 10 to the power of 55. This leaves us with a question: why is the universe so finely tuned for life?
Justin asks: ‘What if the evidence points to this life-permitting universe actually being the product of an intelligent mind, which intended for us to be here?’
Barbara Drossel, Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Darmstadt, Germany, says: ‘The fine-tuning argument is not proof… but it’s...
‘God is not the object of scientific research or mathematical proofs, so we cannot prove him,’ says Barbara Drossel, Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Darmstadt, Germany. ‘But I think there are good reasons for believing in God.’ She talks here with Nigel Bovey about her life in science and her Christian faith, taking in the laws of physics, the big bang and the fine tuning of the universe.
Professor, what is theoretical physics?
It is physics done with pencil and paper and computer modelling rather than laboratory experiments. It focuses on mathematical and computational analysis to explain how and why things happen.
Why did you choose to study science?
I was around 13 when I decided I wanted to be a scientist. At that age, I started, or at least tried, to read...
The professor who introduced ‘The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife’ to the world in 2012, and who has championed it ever since, has finally admitted that the fragment of papyrus may in fact be a fake. Commenting on dramatic new evidence about the story, Professor Karen King of Harvard Divinity School, says, ‘It tips the balance towards forgery’.
The fragment, the size of a credit card, apparently reports Jesus saying the words, ‘My wife… she will be able to be my disciple’, as we reported in this 2012 blog post. It has stirred up intense debate in the academic world over the past four years. Painstaking scholarship discovered that the writing appears to duplicate errors found only in a document published on the internet, and which a forger might simply have copied. A year ago, an...
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We are constantly adding to and updating our resources. We produce written and audio materials which we hope will help answer some of the questions you might have about the Christian faith. Photos above by Taro Taylor and Jon Sullivan
