N.T. Wright on Church, Media, and Public Life

N.T. Wright on Church, Media, and Public Life October 26, 2016

See the plenary by N.T. Wright at a conference on Christians and Media, it was on Church, Media, and Public Life in a Post-Rational World.

Here’s my favourite quote from the talk.

As long as the countries of the Enlightenment could keep the rest of the world at bay, sending the occasional gun-boat to sort out the natives or the more frequent cargo ship to bring back diamonds, emeralds and amethysts, sandalwood and cedarwood and sweet white wine, we could sustain our narrative, but those days are gone, crashing to the ground like the twin towers themselves. And if our only response is to blame Russia – which has had its own quite different, and similarly dangerous, narratives for a long time, and fails to see why it should adopt ours – we are merely refusing to address the real problems. Someone asked me the other day, in public, what St Paul would say if he could address an epistle to Theresa May, and I think he would want to highlight the fact that we live at a crisis point where the multiple worldviews of a dangerous world are like ignorant armies clashing by night, and if the tide of the older faith has retreated from the shore we have no resources to draw on to understand, let alone to address, the things that urgently matter.

For more on the same theme, see Wright’s new book, God in Public.

 


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