Marilyn McCord Adams facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Marilyn McCord Adams
|
|||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Adams in 2006
|
|||||||
| Born |
Marilyn McCord
October 12, 1943 |
||||||
| Died | March 22, 2017 (aged 73) Princeton, New Jersey, US
|
||||||
| Spouse(s) | |||||||
|
|||||||
| Alma mater | |||||||
|
Notable work
|
|
||||||
| Scientific career | |||||||
| Institutions | |||||||
| Thesis | The Problem of God's Foreknowledge and Free Will in Boethius and William Ockham (1967) | ||||||
| Influenced | Christine Helmer | ||||||
Marilyn McCord Adams (born October 12, 1943 – died March 22, 2017) was an important American philosopher and a priest in the Episcopal Church. She studied the philosophy of religion, which looks at big questions about God and faith. She also focused on medieval philosophy, which is the study of ideas from the Middle Ages.
She was a professor at Yale Divinity School and later became a special professor at the University of Oxford in England.
Contents
Early Life and Education
Marilyn McCord Adams was born on October 12, 1943, in Oak Park, Illinois. Her parents were William Clark McCord and Wilmah Brown McCord. In 1966, she married another philosopher named Robert Merrihew Adams.
She went to the University of Illinois and earned her first degree. She then continued her studies at Cornell University, where she earned her PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) degree in 1967. Later, she studied at Princeton Theological Seminary to become a priest, earning a Master of Theology degree in 1984. In 2008, she received a special Doctor of Divinity degree from the University of Oxford. She was the first woman ever to receive this degree from Oxford.
Academic Career
Marilyn McCord Adams spent a lot of her career teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She was a professor of philosophy there from 1978 to 1993. She also led the Department of Philosophy for a few years.
After UCLA, she moved to Yale University. There, she taught about the history of theology from 1993 to 2003. In 2004, Adams moved to England to teach at the University of Oxford. She became the Regius Professor of Divinity, which is a very important teaching position. She was the first woman and the first American to hold this role at Oxford.
After five years in England, she returned to the United States. She taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and later at Rutgers University. In 2015, she was chosen as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which is a great honor. She also helped start and lead the Society of Christian Philosophers.
Ordained Ministry
In 1987, Marilyn McCord Adams became a deacon and then a priest in the Episcopal Church. She served in churches in different cities, including Los Angeles, New Haven, Chapel Hill, and Trenton. While she was a professor at Oxford, she also served as a special priest at Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford.
Work and Writing
Adams's philosophical work mainly focused on the philosophy of religion. She was especially interested in the "problem of evil." This is a big question that asks why bad things happen in the world if God is good and powerful. She wrote a lot about what she called "horrendous evils." These are terrible experiences that seem to destroy a person's life and make them question everything good. She explored how these evils could fit into a world created by a good God.
Personal Life
Marilyn McCord married Robert Merrihew Adams in 1966. She passed away on March 22, 2017, in Princeton, New Jersey, at the age of 73. She had been battling cancer.
Works
- Adams, Marilyn McCord. William of Ockham (2 vols.) Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 1987. ISBN: 0-268-01945-2
- Adams, Marilyn McCord. Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. ISBN: 0-8014-8686-6.
- Adams, Marilyn McCord. Christ and Horrors: The Coherence of Christology. Based on the Gifford Lectures for 1998–1999. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. ISBN: 0-521-68600-8
See also
- Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford
- List of American philosophers
- Theodicy
