January 30, 2006
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417
AMHERST, Mass.—Michael J. Buckley, S.J., University Professor of Theology at Boston College, will speak on “The Dialectical Progress of Modern Atheism” at 4 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 2, in the Cole Assembly Room (Red Room) in Converse Hall at Amherst College. Sponsored by the Newman Club at Amherst College and the Willis D. Wood Fund, Buckley’s talk is free and open to the public.
Michael J. Buckley, S.J. delivered the D’Arcy Lectures at Oxford University last year on the progress of modern atheism. His talk at Amherst will explore the beginnings of this atheistic development in the 18th century, when an articulate, self-confessed atheism emerged for the first time. Over the centuries that followed, this disbelief with its attendant rejections came to influence first the educated intellect of Europe, then those countries touched by the European mind, and finally, great movements and civilizations throughout the world.
Buckley is the author of Denying and Disclosing God: The Ambiguous Progress of Modern Atheism (2004); Papal Primacy and the Episcopate: Towards a Relational Understanding (1998); The Catholic University as Promise and Project: Reflections in a Jesuit Idiom (1998); and At the Origins of Modern Atheism (1990). He has published extensively in systematic theology, philosophy, spirituality, science and theology and the history of ideas.
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