Jesus, History, and Mt. Darwin: An Academic Excursion

Written in the genre of Henry David Thoreau's travel-thinking essays, Jesus, History, and Mount Darwin: An Academic Excursion is the story of a three-day climb into the Evolution Range of the High Sierra mountains of California. Mount Darwin stands among other mountains near fourteen thousand feet high and that are named after promoters of religious versions of evolutionary thinking. Rick Kennedy, a history professor from Point Loma, uses the climb as an opportunity to think about general education and how both the natural history of evolution and the ancient history of Jesus can find a home in the Aristotelian diversity of university methods. Kennedy offers the academic foundations for the credibility and reliability of accounts of Jesus in the New Testament, while pointing out that these foundations have the same weaknesses and strengths that ancient history has in general. Natural history, Kennedy points out, has a different set of strengths and weaknesses from ancient history. Overall, the book reminds students and professors of the wisdom in being humble.

Rick Kennedy is professor of history and environmental studies at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. He is the author of Aristotelian and Cartesian Logic at Harvard: Morton's System of Logick, and Brattle's Compendium of Logick (1995), Faith at State: A Handbook for Christians at Secular Universities (1995, reprint 2002), Student Notebooks at Colonial Harvard: Manuscripts and Educational Practice, 1650-1740. Co-written with Thomas Knoles and Lucia Zaucha Knoles (2003), A History of Reasonableness: Testimony and Authority in the Art of Thinking (2004), Jesus, History, and Mount Darwin: An Academic Excursion, (2008), The First American Evangelical: A Short Life of Cotton Mather (2015), John and Acts, vol. 8 of Cotton Mather's Biblia Americana, 10 vols. Reiner Smolinski and Jan Stievermann, general editors. Co-edited with Harry Clark Maddux and Rebecca Stephens Falcasantos (2023).