Life
John Hick was born on 20 January 1922 to a middle-class family in Scarborough, England. He developed an interest in philosophy and religion in his teens, being encouraged by his uncle, who was an author and teacher at the University of Manchester. Hick initially pursued a law degree at the University of Hull, but converted to Evangelical Christianity and decided to change his career and enrolled at the University of Edinburgh in 1941.
During his studies he became liable for military service in World War II, but, as a conscientious objector on moral grounds, enrolled in the Friends' Ambulance Unit.
After the war, he returned to Edinburgh and became attracted to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and began to question his fundamentalism. In 1948 he completed his MA thesis, which formed the basis of his book Faith and Knowledge. He went on to complete a D. Phil at Oriel College, Oxford University in 1950 and a DLitt from Edinburgh in 1975. In 1953 he married Joan Hazel Bowers, and the couple had three children. After many years as a member of the United Reformed Church, in October 2009 he was accepted into membership of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain. He died in 2012.
Read more about this topic: John Hick
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1934)
“You know all my life I’ve hated funerals. The fuss and bother never brings anybody back. It just spoils remembering them as they really are. And when I see people actually facing it that way, I have to act like a sap.”
—Jules Furthman (1888–1960)
“No self in the mass: the braver being,
The body that could never be wounded,
The life that never would end, no matter
Who died, the being that was an abstraction.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)