Philosophy & Religious Studies
Lectures
CURRENT VOICES
Smith-Wilson / Parkhurst Lecture
This is our annual lecture generally ocurring in October/November or in February on the topic of religion.
Beck Lecture
The Beck lectureship, funded by Paul V. Beck to explore topics relating to science and religion, is an annual event on campus and brings in philosophers, theologians and/or scientists from across the nation.
Coming 2009-2010 Academic Year Lectures
Smith-Wilson in conjunction with Builders in Ministry -- Dr. Lester Ruth coming Feb. 2010 on the topic of theology and worship
Expertise:History of Christian Worship (particularly Early Methodism), Creativity with the Sacraments & Contemporary Worship
B.B.A., Stephen F. Austin University, 1981
M.Div., Asbury Theological Seminary, 1985
Th.M., Emory University, 1988
M.A., University of Notre Dame, 1994
Ph.D., University of Notre Dame, 1996
Dr. Lester Ruth is the Lily May Jarvis Professor of Christian Worship. He began teaching at Asbury Theological Seminary in 2000.
He received a B.B.A. from Stephen F. Austin State University, 1981; a M.Div. from Asbury Seminary, 1985; a Th.M. from Candler School of Theology, Emory University, 1988; and a M.A (1994) and a Ph.D. (1996) from the University of Notre Dame.
Prior to teaching at Asbury Seminary, Dr. Ruth was assistant professor of Liturgical Studies at Yale University Divinity School and Institute of Sacred Music. He has been an adjunct at Tyndale Theological Seminary (Toronto), Northern Baptist Theological Seminary (Chicago) and the Robert E. Webber Institute for Worship Studies (Jacksonville, Fla.). He is a member of the North American Academy of Liturgy.
Dr. Ruth is a member of the Texas Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church. He was ordained as a deacon in 1984 and as an elder in 1987. He has served three appointments.
His book, A Little Heaven Below: Worship at Early Methodist Quarterly Meetings (Nashville: Kingswood Books, 2000) was awarded the Jesse Lee Prize by the United Methodist General Commission on Archives and History. He has also received three teaching awards at Asbury Seminary , two for use of media and one for extended learning. He was on the advisory board for the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship liturgical renewal grants program from 1999 to 2004. He was also a John Wesley Fellow, funded by A Foundation for Theological Education during graduate school.
Dr. Ruth is currently editing a multi-volume set of worship case studies from church history as well as continuing research into the theology of contemporary worship music. Dr. Ruth and his wife, Carmen have two daughters.
Beck-- Dr. Henry F. Schaefer, III coming April 2010 on the topic of religion and science
Graham-Purdue Professor of Chemistry
Director of the Center for Computational Chemistry
B.S. in Chemical Physics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Ph.D. in Chemical Physics
Stanford University
Palo Alto, California
Henry F. Schaefer III was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1944. He attended public schools in Syracuse (New York), Menlo Park (California), and Grand Rapids (Michigan), graduating from East Grand Rapids High School in 1962. He received his B.S. degree in chemical physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1966) and Ph.D. degree in chemical physics from Stanford University (1969). For 18 years (1969-1987) he served as a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. During the 1979-1980 academic year he was also Wilfred T. Doherty Professor of Chemistry and inaugural Director of the Institute for Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Texas, Austin. Since 1987 Dr. Schaefer has been Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Center for Computational Chemistry at the University of Georgia. In 2004 he became Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus, at the University of California at Berkeley. His other academic appointments include Professeur d'Echange at the University of Paris (1977), Gastprofessur at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochshule (ETH), Zurich (1994, 1995, 1997, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006), and David P. Craig Visiting Professor at the Australian National University (1999). He is the author of more than 1100 scientific publications, the majority appearing in the Journal of Chemical Physics or the Journal of the American Chemical Society. A total of 300 scientists from 35 countries gathered in Gyeongju, Korea for a six-day conference in February, 2004 with the title “Theory and Applications of Computational Chemistry: A Celebration of 1000 Papers of Professor Henry F. Schaefer III.”
Critical to Professor Schaefer's scientific success has been a brilliant array of students and coworkers; including 50 undergraduate researchers who have published papers with him, 84 successful Ph.D. students, 41 postdoctoral researchers, and 60 visiting professors who have spent substantial time in the Schaefer group. A number of his students have gone on to positions of distinction in industry (Accelrys, Allstate Insurance, American Cyanamid, AstraZeneca, AT&T, Avaya, Chemical Abstracts, Bicerano and Associates, Computational Geosciences, DeNovaMed, Dow Chemical, Electronic Arts, Endress-Hauser, GAUSSIAN, Goodrich, Henkel, Hughes Aircraft, IBM, Komag, Lehman Brothers, Locus Pharmaceuticals, Mobil Research, Molecular Simulations, Monsanto, OpenEye, OSI Software, Pharmaceutical Research Associates, Polaroid, Proctor & Gamble, Q-CHEM, Reagens Deutschland, Ricoh, Schroedinger, SciCo, Sugen and WaveSplitter Technologies). Four of his graduated Ph.D.s have successfully started their own companies. Several have gone on to successful careers in government laboratories, including the Australian National University Supercomputer Center, Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, NASA Ames, National Cancer Institute, National Center for Disease Control, National Institutes of Health (Bethesda), Naval Research Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, and Sandia National Laboratories. Charles Blahous went directly from his Ph.D. studies with Dr. Schaefer to the position of American Physical Society Congressional Scientist Fellow, and eventually to positions of significant importance in the U.S. political system (chief of staff for Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming and later Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire; and currently chief strategist for President George W. Bush's initiative to reform social security; see Wall Street Journal article April 22, 2005).
Many of Dr. Schaefer's students have accepted professorships in universities, including the University of Alabama at Birmingham, University of Arizona, Budapest University (Hungary), University of California at Merced, City University of New York, Fatih University (Istanbul, Turkey), Georgia Tech, University of Georgia, University of Giessen (Germany), University of Girona (Spain), University of Grenoble (France), University of Guelph (Ontario), University of Illinois-Chicago, University of Illinois-Urbana, Johns Hopkins University, Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, University of Kentucky, University of Manchester (England), University of Marburg (Germany), University of Massachusetts, University of Michigan, University of Mississippi, National Tsing Hua University (Taiwan), University of North Dakota, Ohio State University, Osaka University (Japan), University of Paris - Sud (France), Pohang Institute of Science and Technology (Korea), Portland State University, Pennsylvania State University, Rice University, Rikkyo University (Tokyo), Scripps Research Institute, Stanford University, University of Stirling (Scotland), University of Stockholm (Sweden), University of Tasmania (Australia), Technical University of Munich (Germany), Texas A&M University, the University of Texas at Arlington, University of Trondheim (Norway), and Virginia Tech.
Dr. Schaefer has been invited to present plenary lectures at more than 200 national or international scientific conferences. He has delivered endowed or named lectures or lecture series at more than 40 major universities, including the 1998 Kenneth S. Pitzer Memorial Lecture at Berkeley and the 2001 Israel Pollak Distinguished Lectures at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa. He is the recipient of fourteen honorary degrees. He was the longest serving Editor-in-Chief of the London-based journal Molecular Physics (1995-2005). He was also the longest serving President of the World Association of Theoretical and Computational Chemists, from 1996 to 2005. His service to the chemical community includes the chairmanship of the American Chemical Society's Subdivision of Theoretical Chemistry (1982) and Division of Physical Chemistry (1992). At the 228th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (Philadelphia, August, 2004) the Division of Computers in Chemistry and the Division of Physical Chemistry co-sponsored a four-day symposium in honor of Dr. Schaefer.
Professor Schaefer's major awards include the American Chemical Society Award in Pure Chemistry (1979, "for the development of computational quantum chemistry into a reliable quantitative field of chemistry and for prolific exemplary calculations of broad chemical interest"); the American Chemical Society Leo Hendrik Baekeland Award (1983, "for his contributions to computational quantum chemistry and for outstanding applications of this technique to a wide range of chemical problems"); the Schrödinger Medal (1990); the Centenary Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry (London, 1992, as "the first theoretical chemist successfully to challenge the accepted conclusions of a distinguished experimental group for a polyatomic molecule, namely methylene"); the American Chemical Society Award in Theoretical Chemistry (2003, "for his development of novel and powerful computational methods of electronic structure theory, and their innovative use to solve a host of important chemical problems"). In 2003 he also received the annual American Chemical Society Ira Remsen Award, named after the first chemistry research professor in North America. The Remsen Award citation reads "For work that resulted in more than one hundred distinct, critical theoretical predictions that were subsequently confirmed by experiment and for work that provided a watershed in the field of quantum chemistry, not by reproducing experiment, but using state-of-the-art theory to make new chemical discoveries and, when necessary, to challenge experiment." The Journal of Physical Chemistry published a special issue in honor of Dr. Schaefer on April 15, 2004. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004. He was named the recipient of the prestigious Joseph O. Hirschfelder Prize of the University of Wisconsin for the academic year 2005-2006. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (London) in 2005.
During the comprehensive period 1981 - 1997 Professor Schaefer was the sixth most highly cited chemist in the world; out of a total of 628,000 chemists whose research was cited. The Science Citation Index reports that by December 31, 2004 his research had been cited more than 35,000 times. His research involves the use of state-of-the-art computational hardware and theoretical methods to solve important problems in molecular quantum mechanics.
PAST LECTURERS...
Smith-Wilson Lecture Fall 2008The Reverend and Dr. Leslie Callahan will be visiting SC and delivering a lecture on Charles Fox Parham. Who? Well, Charles Fox Parham is known as a father of Pentecostalism in the United States, but he was also a student here at Southwestern College.
Beck Lecture Spring 2009
This spring's Beck Lecture was delivered by Alvin Plantinga, John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Please plan to visit and tell others.Dr. Plantinga's brief bio...
Philosopher of religion, born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. A professor at Calvin College, Grand Rapids (1963–82) and the University of Notre Dame, IN (1982– ), his works include God and Other Minds (1967), God, Freedom and Evil (1974), The Nature of Necessity (1974), Does God have a Nature? (1980), Warrant the Current Debate (1993), Warrant and Proper Function (1993) Warranted Christian Belief (2000) and Knowledge of God (2008) with Michael Tooley. He is most known for his free will defense against the problem of evil, what has come to be known as reformed epistemology, a modal version of the ontological argument for God's existence and an evolutionary argument against naturalism. Dr. Plantinga will be lecturing on the relationship between science and religion per his entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online entitled, Religion and Science. Please follow the previous link to read the entry and come prepared to listen and interact.
Click below to view the entire speech by Dr. Plantinga from Spring 2009.
Tony's bio...
Tony is the national coordinator of Emergent Village (www.emergentvillage.org), and a doctoral fellow in practical theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. He is the author of many books, including The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier and The Sacred Way: Spiritual Practices for Everyday Life, and he is a sought after speaker and consultant in the areas of emerging church, postmodernism, and Christian spirituality. Tony lives with his wife, Julie, and their three children in Edina, Minnesota.
Past Smith-Wilson/Parkhurst and Beck Lectures...
Smith-Wilson Lecture Fall 2007
The Fall 2007 Smith-Wilson lecturer was Dr. Steven J. Keillor. Dr. Keillor spoke about the relation of his book about God's judgments in history to the individual's life. Given that our culture is "you-centric" what kind of effect does that have in recognizing when God may or may not be working in your life to bring about change. What would God's judgments in your life look like? Contending the God's judgments may look less like a court room verdict and more like smaller, less noticeable event that can culminate in good and bad outcomes. We should be mindful and reflective to try and notice these events and respond to them responsibly in order to mature.
He has a Ph.D in American History from the University of Minnesota. He is adjunct assistant professor of history at Bethel University, St. Paul MN. He has written This Rebellious House: American History and the Truth of Christianity (1996) and God's Judgments: Interpreting History and the Christian Faith (2007), and several books in state and regional history. He writes in a log cabin in northern Minnesota.
Beck Lecture Spring 2008
In Spring of '08 the Beck lecturer was Richard O. Randolph. Dr. Randolph, assistant professor and chair for the department of bioethics at the Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences, spoke on Tuesday, Feb. 5.
Randolph focused on the implications of extraterrestrial life for Christian faith and doctrine. The title of the lecture was “What if Extraterrestrials Really Do Exist? Towards a Cosmic Christian Faith.”
“My basic approach is to examine what the discovery of intelligent or non-intelligent extraterrestrial life would mean for our understanding of basic Christian faith,” Randolph says.
