Understanding soul

Over the course of the semester, a group of faculty and students under the leadership of Christian Early and Ted Grimsrud, have gathered over the Thursday lunch hour to engage in a book study on Whatever Happened to the Soul?: Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature.

The book study will culminate in a special lecture featuring none other than the author of this book, Nancey Murphy, Professor of Christian Philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary. Students need not have read the book to attend Murphy's lecture titled "From Neurons to Politics--Without a Soul."

The lecture will address the need for Christian theology to incorporate a physicalist anthropology, and she will speculate on how a physicalist theology would have impacted Christian attitudes towards politics throughout history.

In a synopsis of her lecture, Murphy simplified the matter, saying, "In brief, I will speculate that if there had been no such thing as souls to save, Christians would have had to find something else to worry about, and maybe, just maybe, they would have concerned themselves with Jesus' teaching about the real, and present, and realizable kingdom of God on earth."

This forum, organized and sponsored by the Shenandoah Anabaptist Scientific Society and co-sponsored by EMU's Student Lecture Series Committee, will be held in Martin Chapel on Thursday, Oct. 27 at 4 p.m.