Ep 4 - CARPENTER

The Collaborative Inquiries Podcast is back! In this episode, Dr Christiana Zenner discusses the "Anthropocene" - what that term denotes in the environmental humanities, and how the language we use to understand humanity's relationship with the natural world continues to evolve. Specifically, Dr Zenner's work explores how fresh water is a nexus of human activity's impact on the planet, human rights, our day-to-day experience of life, and the Catholic theological tradition.

Many scholars ask questions about compatibility between scientific findings and religious doctrines ... but what about the actual day-to-day practice of doing science in a lab? In this episode, Paul Scherz describes his work in genetics, why he switched fields to study moral theology, and how trends in entrepreneurial science and probabilistic risk analysis should be addressed by theologians.

In this episode, Angela Carpenter shares her work in Christian ethics and the life context behind it. She explains how studying the psychological and moral development of children illuminates the role that God's love for us plays in our moral lives at any age, as well as how she situates the role of the sciences in theological scholarship.

What can a theologian contribute to economics? In this episode, Dr Mary Hirschfeld tells her academic story which starts with a PhD in economics at Harvard, takes a major turn through a conversion to Catholicism, and arrives at an anthropological critique of traditional economics from a Christian perspective. Dr Hirschfeld explains how the unspoken assumptions about human rationality made by economists can be critiqued, resulting in an economic vision which is both more compatible with Christianity and more accurate in its approach towards economic success.

How good are people, actually? In this episode, Dr Christian Miller of Wake Forest University discusses his work at the crossroads of psychology and ethics: what do experiments in psychology show us about human character, how do those findings impact virtue ethics, and how does all of this square with Christian religiosity?

Beginning with beginnings - what are the origins of humanity? Dr Agustín Fuentes discusses the state of anthropology in the contemporary academy, what it reveals about religious belief, and why anthropologists and theologians need more conversations with each other.

Introduction, Explanation, and Prologue