“Methinks there be not impossibilities enough in religion for an active faith,” wrote Sir Thomas Browne, the seventeenth-century English author and physician. Browne’s speculation on the paradoxes of religion underscores conversations with two scholars.
The first interview is with William Bouwsma, author of a study of John Calvin, the sixteenth-century French theologian whose writing exerts a continuing influence on contemporary Protestantism.
The second segment [15:00] features William Rowe, who is the author of a study about rationalistic theology, a set of ideas about religion and theology that flourished in eighteenth-century England.
At the time of this interview, Bouwsma, a Fellow at the National Humanities Center (1983-1985), was professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. Rowe, a Fellow at the Center (1984-85), was professor of philosophy at Purdue University.
This edition of Soundings was conducted by Wayne J. Pond.
