We're excited to invite the following to August Apologetics 2024 at CityRise!
August 5: Nancy Pearcey
Nancy will discuss her book Total Truth.
Nancy Pearcey's website
Nancy Pearcey's latest book is The Toxic War on Masculinity: How Christianity Reconciles the Sexes. Her earlier books include Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality, The Soul of Science, Saving Leonardo, Finding Truth, and two ECPA Gold Medallion Award Winners: How Now Shall We Live (coauthored with Harold Fickett and Chuck Colson) and Total Truth. Her books have been translated into 20 languages. She is professor and scholar in residence at Houston Christian University. A former agnostic, Pearcey has spoken at universities such as Princeton, Stanford, USC, and Dartmouth. She has been quoted in The New Yorker and Newsweek, highlighted as one of the five top women apologists by Christianity Today, and hailed in The Economist as "America's pre-eminent evangelical Protestant female intellectual."
About Total Truth: Living with Integrity in a Post-Truth Society:
How do we present the Christian truth in a postmodern culture that no longer believes in truth? Nancy Pearcey, professor of apologetics at Houston Christian University, explains how Western culture has lost its grasp on truth and how Christians can communicate more effectively with our secular friends and family members. And don’t think Christians are immune—many young people in the church are absorbing post-truth trends as well. To live with integrity, we need to start with a biblical view of truth.
Nancy Pearcey's website
Nancy Pearcey's latest book is The Toxic War on Masculinity: How Christianity Reconciles the Sexes. Her earlier books include Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality, The Soul of Science, Saving Leonardo, Finding Truth, and two ECPA Gold Medallion Award Winners: How Now Shall We Live (coauthored with Harold Fickett and Chuck Colson) and Total Truth. Her books have been translated into 20 languages. She is professor and scholar in residence at Houston Christian University. A former agnostic, Pearcey has spoken at universities such as Princeton, Stanford, USC, and Dartmouth. She has been quoted in The New Yorker and Newsweek, highlighted as one of the five top women apologists by Christianity Today, and hailed in The Economist as "America's pre-eminent evangelical Protestant female intellectual."
About Total Truth: Living with Integrity in a Post-Truth Society:
How do we present the Christian truth in a postmodern culture that no longer believes in truth? Nancy Pearcey, professor of apologetics at Houston Christian University, explains how Western culture has lost its grasp on truth and how Christians can communicate more effectively with our secular friends and family members. And don’t think Christians are immune—many young people in the church are absorbing post-truth trends as well. To live with integrity, we need to start with a biblical view of truth.
August 12: Abdu Murray
Abdu will discuss his book Grand Central Question.
Embrace the Truth website
Abdu Murray is a speaker, author, and attorney who specializes in addressing issues where religious faith and emerging cultural trends intersect and collide. Since founding Embrace the Truth in 2004, Abdu has spent decades analyzing how the major religious and non-religious thought traditions have attempted to address emerging cultural issues.
He has written four books, including Saving Truth, Grand Central Question, Apocalypse Later, and More than a White Man’s Religion.
His articles have been featured in Fox News, Christianity Today, Washington Times, Christian Post, and Western Journal.
Murray has tackled complex issues in Q&A forums, debates, and dialogues at leading universities such as Yale, Berkeley, MIT, University of Michigan, University of Florida, Laurentian University, San Marcos University, Universidad Cientifica del Sur, and others around the world. He has also addressed political and business leaders in countries such as the United States, Canada, Peru, and Hong Kong. Mr. Murray hosts the podcast and YouTube shows All Rise, Deliberations LIVE, and CouldaShouldaWoulda. His YouTube videos have been viewed millions of times across the globe.
While an attorney at two major law firms in Detroit, he was named to Best Lawyers in America and to Michigan Super Lawyers. Murray lives in the Metro Detroit area with his wife and their three children.
About Grand Central Question - Ansering the Critical Questions of the Major Worldviews:
Christians long to share the Gospel with those who hold different worldviews, only to find themselves ill equipped to answer such peoples’ deepest questions. As a result, Christians shrink away from fulfilling the Great Commission. Grand Central Question (a) explains that each of the major worldviews tries to address a particular, focal issue and (b) shows that the Gospel addresses these genuine issues in intelligent and emotionally satisfying ways.
Embrace the Truth website
Abdu Murray is a speaker, author, and attorney who specializes in addressing issues where religious faith and emerging cultural trends intersect and collide. Since founding Embrace the Truth in 2004, Abdu has spent decades analyzing how the major religious and non-religious thought traditions have attempted to address emerging cultural issues.
He has written four books, including Saving Truth, Grand Central Question, Apocalypse Later, and More than a White Man’s Religion.
His articles have been featured in Fox News, Christianity Today, Washington Times, Christian Post, and Western Journal.
Murray has tackled complex issues in Q&A forums, debates, and dialogues at leading universities such as Yale, Berkeley, MIT, University of Michigan, University of Florida, Laurentian University, San Marcos University, Universidad Cientifica del Sur, and others around the world. He has also addressed political and business leaders in countries such as the United States, Canada, Peru, and Hong Kong. Mr. Murray hosts the podcast and YouTube shows All Rise, Deliberations LIVE, and CouldaShouldaWoulda. His YouTube videos have been viewed millions of times across the globe.
While an attorney at two major law firms in Detroit, he was named to Best Lawyers in America and to Michigan Super Lawyers. Murray lives in the Metro Detroit area with his wife and their three children.
About Grand Central Question - Ansering the Critical Questions of the Major Worldviews:
Christians long to share the Gospel with those who hold different worldviews, only to find themselves ill equipped to answer such peoples’ deepest questions. As a result, Christians shrink away from fulfilling the Great Commission. Grand Central Question (a) explains that each of the major worldviews tries to address a particular, focal issue and (b) shows that the Gospel addresses these genuine issues in intelligent and emotionally satisfying ways.
August 19: James M. Tour, Ph.D.
Dr. Tour's talk is entitled "Scientists Remain Clueless on the Origin of First Life"
Dr. Tour's website
James M. Tour Ph.D
T. T. and W. F. Chao Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Materials Science and NanoEngineering, and Professor of Computer Science, Rice University, Rice Advanced Materials Institute, and the NanoCarbon Center
James M. Tour, a synthetic organic chemist, received his Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from Syracuse University, his Ph.D. in synthetic organic and organometallic chemistry from Purdue University, and postdoctoral training in synthetic organic chemistry at the University of Wisconsin and Stanford University. After spending 11 years on the faculty of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of South Carolina, he joined the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology at Rice University in 1999. Tour’s scientific research areas include a broad array of materials and nanomaterials chemistries from advanced materials synthesis to nanomedicine and nanoelectronics, with a special focus on synthesis of carbon materials including fullerenes, nanotubes and graphene. He has also developed strategies for retarding chemical terrorist attacks. He has founded 13 companies, three of them now public companies.
Professor Tour has over 800 research publications and over 130 granted patents and over 100 pending patents, with an h-index = 175 with total citations over 140,000 (according to Google Scholar). In 2024, Tour won the Rice University Breakthrough Research Award for Flash Graphene Synthesis. In 2024, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. In 2021, he won the Oesper Award from the American Chemical Society which is awarded to “outstanding chemists for lifetime significant accomplishments in the field of chemistry with long-lasting impact on the chemical sciences.” In 2020, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and in the same year was awarded the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Centenary Prize for innovations in materials chemistry with applications in medicine and nanotechnology. He was inducted into the National Academy of Inventors in 2015. Tour was named among “The 50 Most Influential Scientists in the World Today” by “TheBestSchools.org” in 2019; listed in “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds” by Thomson Reuters in 2014; and recipient of the Trotter Prize in “Information, Complexity and Inference” in 2014; and was the Lady Davis Visiting Professor, Hebrew University, June, 2014. Tour was named “Scientist of the Year” by R&D Magazine, 2013. He was awarded the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching, 2012, Rice University; won the ACS Nano Lectureship Award from the American Chemical Society, 2012; was the Lady Davis Visiting Professor, Hebrew University, June, 2011 and was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 2009. Tour was ranked one of the Top 10 chemists in the world over the past decade, by a Thomson Reuters citations per publication index survey, 2009; won the Distinguished Alumni Award, Purdue University, 2009 and the Houston Technology Center’s Nanotechnology Award in 2009. He won the Feynman Prize in Experimental Nanotechnology in 2008, the NASA Space Act Award in 2008 for his development of carbon nanotube reinforced elastomers and the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award from the American Chemical Society for his achievements in organic chemistry in 2007. Tour was the recipient of the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching in 2007. He also won the Small Times magazine’s Innovator of the Year Award in 2006, the Nanotech Briefs Nano 50 Innovator Award in 2006, the Alan Berman Research Publication Award, Department of the Navy in 2006, the Southern Chemist of the Year Award from the American Chemical Society in 2005 and The Honda Innovation Award for Nanocars in 2005. Tour’s paper on Nanocars was the most highly accessed journal article of all American Chemical Society articles in 2005, and it was listed by LiveScience as the second most influential paper in all of science in 2005. Tour has won several other national awards including the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award in Polymer Chemistry and the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award in Polymer Chemistry.
Dr. Tour's website
James M. Tour Ph.D
T. T. and W. F. Chao Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Materials Science and NanoEngineering, and Professor of Computer Science, Rice University, Rice Advanced Materials Institute, and the NanoCarbon Center
James M. Tour, a synthetic organic chemist, received his Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from Syracuse University, his Ph.D. in synthetic organic and organometallic chemistry from Purdue University, and postdoctoral training in synthetic organic chemistry at the University of Wisconsin and Stanford University. After spending 11 years on the faculty of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of South Carolina, he joined the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology at Rice University in 1999. Tour’s scientific research areas include a broad array of materials and nanomaterials chemistries from advanced materials synthesis to nanomedicine and nanoelectronics, with a special focus on synthesis of carbon materials including fullerenes, nanotubes and graphene. He has also developed strategies for retarding chemical terrorist attacks. He has founded 13 companies, three of them now public companies.
Professor Tour has over 800 research publications and over 130 granted patents and over 100 pending patents, with an h-index = 175 with total citations over 140,000 (according to Google Scholar). In 2024, Tour won the Rice University Breakthrough Research Award for Flash Graphene Synthesis. In 2024, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. In 2021, he won the Oesper Award from the American Chemical Society which is awarded to “outstanding chemists for lifetime significant accomplishments in the field of chemistry with long-lasting impact on the chemical sciences.” In 2020, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and in the same year was awarded the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Centenary Prize for innovations in materials chemistry with applications in medicine and nanotechnology. He was inducted into the National Academy of Inventors in 2015. Tour was named among “The 50 Most Influential Scientists in the World Today” by “TheBestSchools.org” in 2019; listed in “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds” by Thomson Reuters in 2014; and recipient of the Trotter Prize in “Information, Complexity and Inference” in 2014; and was the Lady Davis Visiting Professor, Hebrew University, June, 2014. Tour was named “Scientist of the Year” by R&D Magazine, 2013. He was awarded the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching, 2012, Rice University; won the ACS Nano Lectureship Award from the American Chemical Society, 2012; was the Lady Davis Visiting Professor, Hebrew University, June, 2011 and was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 2009. Tour was ranked one of the Top 10 chemists in the world over the past decade, by a Thomson Reuters citations per publication index survey, 2009; won the Distinguished Alumni Award, Purdue University, 2009 and the Houston Technology Center’s Nanotechnology Award in 2009. He won the Feynman Prize in Experimental Nanotechnology in 2008, the NASA Space Act Award in 2008 for his development of carbon nanotube reinforced elastomers and the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award from the American Chemical Society for his achievements in organic chemistry in 2007. Tour was the recipient of the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching in 2007. He also won the Small Times magazine’s Innovator of the Year Award in 2006, the Nanotech Briefs Nano 50 Innovator Award in 2006, the Alan Berman Research Publication Award, Department of the Navy in 2006, the Southern Chemist of the Year Award from the American Chemical Society in 2005 and The Honda Innovation Award for Nanocars in 2005. Tour’s paper on Nanocars was the most highly accessed journal article of all American Chemical Society articles in 2005, and it was listed by LiveScience as the second most influential paper in all of science in 2005. Tour has won several other national awards including the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award in Polymer Chemistry and the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award in Polymer Chemistry.