Research Interests:
Lawrence began his professional life as an astronomer but soon moved into theology, completing a PhD supervised by Colin Gunton at King’s College London (‘The Kingdom of Creation: God’s Providential Care for the Non-human’, 1989). He then spent five years working in various capacities for the British Council of Churches project, ‘The Gospel and our Culture’. From 1994 to 1996 he was the Templeton Postdoctoral Research Fellow in science and religion at Ridley Hall, Cambridge. The focus of his research was a comparison of the concepts of time in contemporary theology and the physical sciences. In 1999, Lawrence left academia for personal reasons and since then has worked as a freelance academic copy-editor specializing in theology and religious studies.
Having retired from copy-editing, Lawrence has decided to revisit his PhD thesis, updating and revising it in light of his move from evangelical Anglicanism to Russian Orthodoxy. In addition, he is interested in the Paris school of Orthodox theology (particularly Paul Evdokimov).
Selected Publications:
Books
Angels of Light? The challenge of New Age spirituality (London: DLT, 1992).
Guardians of Creation: Nature in theology and the Christian Life (Leicester: IVP, 1993).
Restoring the Vision: The gospel and modern culture (London: Mowbrays, 1995).Book Chapters
‘Against the Stoics: Non-order and temporality in contemporary Christian theology’ in The Study of Time IX: Time, Order, Chaos edited by J T Fraser & M Soulsby (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1997), 21–31.
‘The Gospel and Cultures in Dialogue: The challenge for the churches’ in A Soul for Europe: Ethics and spirituality in the process of European Integration edited by Daniela Schwarzer & Wolfgang Lenz (Tübingen: EAALCE, 1998), 37–53.
‘Theology and the New Physics’ in God, Humanity and the Cosmos: A textbook in science and religion edited by Christopher Southgate et al. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999, 2005, 2011), 95–136.
‘Creation’ in New Dictionary of Biblical Theology edited by D Alexander & B Rosner (Leicester: IVP, 2000), 429–35.
‘The Franciscans and Natural Philosophy in the Thirteenth Century’ in Augustine and Science edited by John Doody, Adam Goldstein and Kim Paffenroth (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012), 69–81.
Papers
‘A Theological Perspective on Barrow and Tipler’s The Anthropic Cosmological Principle’, Science and Christian Belief Vol. 2, No. 1 (1990), 47–52.
‘Machine or Mother Goddess? The Gaia Hypothesis in contemporary scientific and religious thought’, Science and Christian Belief, Vol. 4, No. 1 (1992), 27–41.
‘Entertaining Angels: Their place in contemporary theology’, Tyndale Bulletin, Vol. 45 No. 2 (1994), 273–96.
‘Spacetime and Revelation’, Science and Christian Belief, Vol. 8 No. 2 (1996), 111–23.
‘Archetypes, Angels and Gaia’, Ecotheology, Issue 10 (2001), 9–22.
‘Trinity and Creation’, Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology, Vol. 32, no. 1 (2014), 12-27.
Contact Details:
Email: lawrence@lhosborn.co.uk
Academia page: https://independent.academia.edu/LawrenceOsborn
Blog: https://lhosborn.typepad.com/always_beginning_again/