Jeremy Begbie
Jeremy Begbie Thomas A. Langford Research Professor of Theology, is the director of DITA (Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts) at Duke University, NC, USA. He teaches systematic theology and specializes in the interface between theology and the arts. His particular research interests are in the interplay between music and theology.
Previously associate principal of Ridley Hall, Cambridge, he has also been honorary professor at the University of St Andrews, where he directed the research project, Theology Through the Arts at the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts. He is a senior member of Wolfson College and an affiliated lecturer in the faculty of music at the University of Cambridge.
He studied philosophy and music at Edinburgh University, and theology at Aberdeen and Cambridge. A professionally trained musician, he has performed extensively as a pianist, oboist and conductor. He is an ordained minister of the Church of England, having served for a number of years as assistant pastor of a church in West London.
He is author of a number of books, including Voicing Creation's Praise: Towards a Theology of the Arts (T & T Clark); Theology, Music and Time (CUP), and most recently, Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music (Baker/SPCK), which won the Christianity Today 2008 Book Award in the Theology/Ethics Category. Most recently, he has published Music, Modernity, and God (OUP). He has taught widely in the UK and North America, and delivered multimedia performance-lectures across the world, from Israel to Australia and Hong Kong.
Key Publications
Theology, Music and Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
With Steven R. Guthrie, eds., Resonant Witness: Conversations Between Music and Theology. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011.
Modernity and God. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013
Other Publications
2003. "Unexplored Eloquencies: Music, Religion and Culture." In Mediating Religion, edited by Sophia Marriage and Jolyon Mitchell, 93-106. Edinburgh: T & T Clark.
2010. "Worldview, Measurement and 'The Roots of Spirituality'." In The Archaeology of Measurement: Comprehending Heaven, Earth and Time in Ancient Societies, edited by Iain Morley and Colin Renfrew, 250-256. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2010. Music on the Brain: Review of Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (New York: Knopf Press, 2007). Books and Culture, March/April, 18.
2011. "Faithful Feelings: Music and Emotion in Worship." In Resonant Witness: Essays in Theology and Music, edited by Jeremy S. Begbie and Steven R. Guthrie, 323-354. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.
2012. "Confidence and Anxiety in Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius." In Music and Theology in Nineteenth-Century Britain, edited by M. V. Clarke, 197-213. Farnham: Ashgate.