UW professor to speak Sept. 26 in Mind-Brain-Soul: Intersections in Science and Theology Lecture Series

UW professor to speak Sept. 26 in Mind-Brain-Soul: Intersections in Science and Theology Lecture Series

Derek Jeffreys will speak on "Countering Non-Reductive Physicalism: A Thomistic Defense of the Soul" at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Sept. 26, in O'Shaughnessy Educational Center auditorium. He will refute non-reductive physicalism – the belief that the soul does not exist.

Jeffreys is associate professor of humanistic studies and religion at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. He holds a Ph.D. in religious ethics from the University of Chicago Divinity school, and specializes in political ethics and the philosophy of religion. He is the author of Defending Human Dignity: John Paul II and the Political Realism and has published in Theology and Science, the Review of Politics, Religious Studies and other journals. In 2002 he received a John Templeton Foundation Religion and Science Course Award for a course that compared Buddhist and Christian approaches to science.

Free and open to the public, his talk is part of the series, Mind-Brain-Soul: Intersections in Science and Theology, which is sponsored by the North Central Program for Science and Theology. The program is a project of the Minnesota Consortium of Theological Schools in cooperation with Luther Seminary, the University of St. Thomas, Bethel University and Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church.

The next lecture in this series will be Dr. Gary Hatfield from the University of Pennsylvania speaking on "What Can the Mind Tell Us About the Brain?" at noon Friday, Oct. 14, in Room 1-142, Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota.