Our project investigates the cogency of the perennial conception of the divine. Rooted in the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions, this view holds that there is one divine being who is the source of all reality and has the attributes of simplicity, immutability, impassibility, omnipotence, omniscience, eternality, and omnibenevolence. The activities of our project are:
(1) Two workshops at the University of St. Thomas to bring together leading philosophers and theologians who work on the perennial conception of God, with promising junior scholars and seminary instructors.
(2) Two stipend competitions to support high quality academic research on the perennial conception of the divine.
(3) Thirty awards to motivate participants to publish articles in high quality academic journals.
(4) Two public lectures at the University of St. Thomas, aimed particularly at the seminary students, to highlight the value of the philosophical method for investigating the perennial conception of God.
We expect that at least 30 peer reviewed articles will result from our project, along with a special issue of, or Disputed Question in, the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly. The project will impact philosophers, theologians, religious studies scholars, seminarians and clergy. By making a substantial impact on the literature and bolstering the growth of interdisciplinary interaction between philosophy and theology, we hope that our project will revitalize interest in this conception of the divine and generate new approaches to longstanding difficulties regarding its cogency.
An especially important enduring impact of this project is that it will bring Analytic Theology into seminaries in an unprecedented way. Analytic Theology has enjoyed - largely through generous funding of Templeton - a rapid growth in the academic world. But its growth has been much slower in seminary settings. Our project will fertilize that soil.
