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:
“It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times—the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie—seem attractive by comparison.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)
“What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Perhaps the happiest moment of my life was then, when I saw that our line didn’t break and that the enemy’s did.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)