Newman Centre Annual Lecture: Rev. Prof. Sarah Coakley
Rev. Prof. Sarah Coakley will deliver the Newman Centre Annual Lecture on Thursday 26 September at 4pm in the Newman University Church, 87a St. Stephen's Green, and online at https://www.youtube.com/live/xaJZK7ujTpU.
The lecture is titled:
Natural Theology in a Changed Key: What Newman Might Have Thought About the Contemporary Debates on Evolutionary Co-operation.
Abstract: In this lecture Sarah Coakley is concerned, critically, with the way that evolution has been purveyed in the last generation as ‘selfishly’-oriented genetically, yet also rendered devoid of either positive meaning or discernible structure. Yet the evolutionary phenomenon of ‘cooperation’, when mathematically understood, she argues, suggests otherwise; and indeed it may, by a series of steps, lead inexorably to the question of a ‘natural’ basis for ethics and thence to the God question. Drawing creatively on the thought of Newman in the last section of this lecture, Coakley ponders whether his notion of the ‘illative sense’, along with his own responses to Darwin’s theory of evolution, may help chart a way forward in assessing the ongoing possibility of a contemporary 'natural theology’.
Sarah Coakley is the Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity, emerita, University of Cambridge (2007-18), and earlier in her career held positions at the Universities of Lancaster, Oriel College, Oxford, and Harvard Divinity School (Mallinckrodt Professor of Divinity, 1995-2007). In 2012 she gave the Gifford Lectures at Aberdeen University, and since then has continued to work in the contested areas of evolutionary biology, philosophy of science, and theology. Amongst her various other publications are: The Broken Body: Israel, Christ and Fragmentation (2024);The New Asceticism(2015);God, Sexuality and the Self(2013); (co-ed.)Evolution, Games and God (2013), andPowers and Submissions (2002, new edition forthcoming).
