We have to create a thoroughgoing, extensive and perceptive and rhetorically effective critique of the superficiality of consumer choice in society. And at the same time we have to try to among ourselves to develop a coherent, deeper account of how you might try to think about things like the human life, human reproduction, death and so on.
hat tip to Godspy
2 comments:
There are two stances or positions that you find among believers, neither of which is helpful… One is a sort of sour, embittered, resentful condemnation -- it’s all evil, it’s corrupt, it’s terrible -- and this isn’t going to be helpful. If that’s all you have to say then it’s better to just stay out of it really, because that only confirms people’s impression that religion is about darkness and depression and negativity and so on. And the other kind of unhelpful contribution comes from the wildly silly evangelicals who think that it’s all happy, happy, happy.
Neither dark Calvinistic condemnation nor happy sunshine evangelism can really be taken seriously in contemporary society. I think that religious believers have to establish their intellectual credibility. They need to show their intellectual standing...
The Church needs more intellectuals. In Britain… in the first 30 years of the 20th century the Catholic Church attracted a very large number of converts... Why? Because they were attracted by the intellectual rigour of Catholicism. So we have to establish our intellectual credentials with the world and show that we’re intellectually rigorous and not condemning the world or going around in a sort of happy trance…
Quick impressions. His final comments brought to mind Mark Noll's The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" (see the link for a First Thing's symposium.
On the other hand, when I think of Protestant intellectuals, the popular writers Francis Schaeffer and Os Guiness come to mind.
I appreciated his positive yet critical view of culture. And also, his urgings to complement natural law with an imaginative engagement with the culture.
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