HELENA – As the lead-off event to Carroll College’s 2019 inauguration week activities, the college is hosting Dr. Warren S. Brown for its annual lecture on Faith and Reason. Dr. Brown will present an evening community lecture on April 23, entitled “The Physical Nature of Christian Life.” This event is free and open to the public.
In his lecture, Dr. Brown will address the implications of recent insights in modern neuroscience that attribute mental capacities often ascribed to a disembodied soul instead to the functions of the brain and body in collaboration with social experience. He explores how this insight changes the traditional "care of souls," encouraging more attention to fostering spiritual growth through a social and communal focus.
“To say we are embodied is to move away from the Cartesian idea of a disembodied soul as the source of our religiousness and spirituality, and toward the idea of humankind as nested in God’s physical creation. We were created by God as beings inescapably implicated with the physical and biological world.” – Dr. Brown, in his article on psychology and embodied cognition.
About Warren S. Brown, Jr., PhD
Dr. Warren S. Brown is Director of the Lee Edward Travis Research Institute and Professor of Psychology, Department of Doctoral Psychology, at Fuller Theological Seminar in Pasadena, California.
Dr. Brown is most actively involved in neuroscience research related to the cognitive and psychosocial disabilities in a congenital brain malformation called agenesis of the corpus callosum. Brown has also studied callosal function in dyslexia, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, multiple sclerosis, and Alzheimer’s disease, and he has done research on brain wave changes associated with aging and dementia, language comprehension, dialysis treatment for kidney disease, and attention deficits in schizophrenia.
Brown has authored or coauthored over 75 scholarly articles in such peer-reviewed scientific journals as Neuropsychologia, Psychophysiology, Biological Psychiatry, Developmental Neuropsychology, Cortex, Nature Review Neuroscience, and Science; 15 chapters in edited scholarly books; and over 150 presentations at scientific meetings.
Brown has also written and lectured on the integration of neuroscience and Christian faith and was principal editor and contributor to Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature (1998). He was also editor and contributor to Understanding Wisdom: Sources, Science and Society (2000), and wrote (with Nancey Murphy) Did My Neurons Make Me Do It? Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will(2007). He is also coauthor of Neuroscience, Psychology and Religion: Illusions, Delusions, and Realities of Human Nature (with Malcolm Jeeves, 2009) and The Physical Nature of Christian Life: Neuroscience, Psychology and the Church (with Brad Strawn, 2012).
This annual Faith and Reason lecture is sponsored by the Carroll College Hunthausen Center for Peace and Justice
This event is in conjunction with the 2019 inauguration of Dr. John Cech as the 18th President of Carroll College and is free and open to the public. Members of the Helena community are encouraged to attend.