The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World – An evening with Iain McGilchrist. Thursday November 13th 2014, 6.00pm for 6.30pm.
Post-liberalism is a worldview that adopts, reforms, and critiques many of the central tenets of both the social and economic liberalisms of the past century. Its concern, according to commentators like David Goodhart – who addressed an audience at Theos last week – is that that these twin liberalisms have combined over a generation to notable ill effect.
It seems to me that the default position in the contemporary mind is often that there are two ways of talking – the literal (which deals with serious stuff) and the metaphorical (dealing with the eccentric, metaphysical or the largely unimportant). You take issue with both of those elements in The Edge of Words. Let’s start with the literal. When can and should we speak literally? Is there such a thing as ‘normal’, literal speech?
When it comes to difficult policy issues, complex social problems or emotive subjects, nothing is more attractive than the offer of a simple solution. The problem of terrorism touches upon some of the most difficult issues in our society: the boundaries of privacy; the nature of citizenship; the limits of free speech. Terrorists often perceive our society in a manner that is totally alien to us, and ostensibly seek to establish a world vision that we find repugnant. Understanding why they do so is profoundly difficult. It is not surprising that the history of our failure to understand terrorism has been characterised by our search for a simplistic explanation to it.
How to approach the issue of radicalisation? I’m wary, knowing the opprobrium unleashed on those who demur from the orthodoxy and offer rival views on what to do now that we are where we are. Allegations of being apologists for mass murderers or retarded in one’s understanding of religion are never easy criticisms to pass off as merely unconstructive. But the ease with which such allegations fly is perhaps an indication of the polarisation of the debate on radicalisation and our failure to want to deal with causal factors and explanatory variables however uncomfortable they may be.
If the Labour frontbench, gathering in Manchester this week, had felt the mood of English cities and localities in their political bones they would have predicted the crisis that is now engulfing them the very moment that Cameron, Milliband and Clegg made 'the vow'.
Over the last two weeks, Theos has hosted blogs from Nigel Biggar and Doug Gay setting out the cases for Union and for Independence. In the run up to the vote, Theos' Ben Ryan and this week Jonathan Chaplin, Director of the Kirby Laing Institute for Chritsian Ethics, stand back from the cases for and against, and pose some wider questions. Last week, Ben asked whether it might be a good election to lose; this week Jonathan asks what the debate what the debate is actually about. This blog first appeared on the KLICE website.
The resignation of Baroness Warsi over the government’s policy on Gaza means that the relatively recently created role of Minister for Faith and Communities is unfilled.
Lord Patten, it has been announced, will be advising Pope Francis on improving the Vatican’s use of media. Cue immediate and inevitable misreporting of what that actually means in practice. The Daily Mail led the way with the headline “God’s Spinner” and opening line “Tory peer Lord Patten has become a spin doctor for the Pope - just two months after stepping down from the BBC for health reasons.” The Guardian was not alone in reaching for sexual abuse scandal as a common feature between Patten’s tenure at the BBC and the Vatican, the implicit suspicion being that the Church needs someone to spin that disaster away.