{"id":135893,"date":"2025-03-25T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-03-25T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=135893"},"modified":"2025-03-25T06:29:22","modified_gmt":"2025-03-25T10:29:22","slug":"samuel-wells","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=135893","title":{"rendered":"(ABC Aus. Religion and Ethics) Samuel Wells-What kind of people do we want to be? A vision for a renewed politics in a time of global tumult"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

If you want to try to change the world, you\u2019ve broadly got three options. You can work with<\/em> the powerful \u2014 not necessarily sharing their goals or methods, not always endorsing their slogans or ignoring their lies, but nonetheless patiently correcting their wrong turnings and softening their harsh judgements. Alternatively, you can work against<\/em> the powerful. You can campaign for the dignity of suppressed peoples and groups, you can highlight miscarriages of justice, you may denounce and upbraid and protest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But that choice \u2014 between a pragmatism that risks complacency and an idealism that flirts with self-righteousness \u2014 doesn\u2019t comprise the full set of options. There\u2019s a third approach, and that is to seek to model what a better society might look like: to practise a renewed politics<\/em> and try to inspire others to join you, and in their own context do the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you think about it, both the Old and the New Testaments assume that third kind of politics. The Old Testament is about the chosen people: a tiny nation buffeted from Canaan to Egypt to the wilderness to the Promised Land and later to Babylon and back. They have no pretensions to be masters of the universe. They\u2019re hard-pressed just to run their own society faithfully and protect it from invaders. The New Testament is even more limited in aspiration to conventional political power: this is a people seeking to model a transformed life, without any pretension to geographical territory. All they\u2019re looking to do is to live God\u2019s future now by sharing together the life they will enter eternally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From time to time a society has to ask itself, What kind of people do we want to be?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>

Saint Martin in-the-Fields \u2018Royal Parish Church\u2019 Trafalgar Square #London<\/a>
(1810 Thomas Bonnor after James Robert Thompson \u2066\u2066@YaleBritishArt<\/a>\u2069)
The James Gibbs design of 1722-6 is a much copied church design across New England. pic.twitter.com\/43aP1Hv17v<\/a><\/p>— OldLondonNow (@oldlondonnow) February 22, 2021<\/a><\/blockquote>