Date/Time
Date(s) - January 30, 2025
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Categories No Categories
C.S. Lewis famously spoke of fleeting experiences of joy he had early in life, a longing for something this world cannot satisfy. Dr. Begbie will creatively explore this through music, comparing this pre-Christian unfulfilled desire with Christian hope.
Jeremy Begbie is the Thomas A. Langford Distinguished Research Professor of Theology at Duke Divinity School, and McDonald Agape Director of Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts. He teaches systematic theology, and specializes in the interface between theology and the arts. He is Senior Member at Wolfson College, Cambridge, and an Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Music at the University of Cambridge. His books include Theology, Music and Time (Cambridge University Press); Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music (Baker/SPCK); and Music, Modernity, and God (Oxford University Press); and Abundantly More (Baker).
Jeremy is a very engaging speaker who has taught widely in the UK and North America, and delivered multimedia performance-lectures in many parts of the world.
Concerning Abundantly More: The Theological promise of the Arts in a Reductionist World,
Late-modern culture has been marred by reductionism, which shrinks and flattens our vision of ourselves and the world. Jeremy Begbie believes that the arts by their nature push against reductionism, helping us understand and experience more deeply the infinite richness of God’s love and the world God has made. Begbie in this work analyses and critiques reductionism and its effects. He shows how the arts can resist reductive impulses by opening us up to an unlimited abundance of meaning. And he demonstrates how engaging the arts in light of a trinitarian imagination (which itself cuts against reductionism) generates a unique way of witnessing to and sharing in the life and purposes of God. This trajectory keeps our culture open to the possibility of God.
“In this book, Jeremy Begbie achieves a remarkable double feat: a quietly devastating critique of engrained reductionist tendencies in Western modernity and, in dialogue with his profoundly humane theological insight, an inspiring manifesto for fundamental value of the arts as part of what makes us human.” ~Bettina Varwig, University of Cambridge