Announcing the Annual Jay Newman Memorial Lecture in the Philosophy of Religion

Professor Jay Newman

Jay Newman was a former president and long time member of CTS. He was a prominent Canadian scholar with a keen interest in the philosophy of religion. He authored eleven books, seven relating to religion or the religious life. He was a member of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Guelph from 1971 until his death on June 17, 2007. Professor Newman left a bequest to CTS for the purpose of endowing an annual lecture in the Philosophy of Religion. It is his generosity that enables us to launch this annual lecture this year.

We welcome Professor John Schellenberg to give the 2009 inaugural lecture. John Schellenberg holds an Oxford D.Phil. His first book is the well known Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason. He has just finished a trilogy on the philosophy of religion: Prolegomena to a Philosophy of Religion (2005), The Wisdom to Doubt: a Justification of Religious Skepticism (2007), The Will to Imagine: A Justification of Skeptical Religion (2009).

Dr. Schellenberg’s lecture, entitled “Philosophy of Religion: A State of the Subject Report“, will address why philosophy of religion today is so often theologically conservative — the resulting demarcation problem — how both religious and philosophical assumptions are hindering insight in contemporary philosophy of religion — how the resolution of these problems is likely to favour non-conservative rather than conservative theology. The lecture will be given as part of the Annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences on Tuesday, May 26th at 11:25 am in the Herzberg Building, room 4351, at Carleton University. For further details, see the complete CTS 2009 program.