Reading and Listening
January 15th, 2009 | by Matthew Smith |Ironically, the Christmas period affords me little time for spiritual and theological reflection because I am usually busy trying to attend to various family and social commitments! But I have been reading and listening to theology. On the listening front, I’m still subscribed to the Philosopher’s Zone on Radio National which I really enjoy (more than The Religion Report even) and also happened to be loaned a CD of Soularize talks which come from an emerging church conference.
On the reading front, I’m still plodding through John Carroll’s The Wreck of Western Culture, not because it is badly written or anything but just because I don’t get much time to read and when I do, I prefer to read science fiction so it’s difficult to crack open a theological text (even though this is kind of a sociological / historical book). The book is quite entertaining for me on some levels because Carroll uses classical paintings, sculpture and Shakespeare to illustrate his points about how culture has evolved over the last half century or so. I’ll do a more detailed post about this book at some stage.
As for Soularize, I’ve listened to the first two lectures which are by N. T. Wright looking at the book of Acts and then one of Paul’s speeches I think in Corinth where he was required to defend his faith and how he avoided being charged with preaching a new deity by appealing to the “altar to an unknown God”. Wright’s first talk was a bit of a whirlwind but tended to focus on Stephen’s speech when he was stoned to death and the context of Christianity as it started within Judaism. The second talk focussed on parallels on how Christians might address society today by identifying the places in our society where “an unknown God” is worshipped and also what modern idols can be challenged.