“We have over the last few decades lost a huge amount of cultural awareness of Christianity. If you read PG Wodehouse’s stories, what’s amazing is the number of quotations from the Bible and Hymns Ancient & Modern. It’s extraordinary…. you could assume a lot of people would have been to Sunday school, heard the Bible read in school, would have sung H A&M. It’s all gone, gone because of shifting patterns of education not just religious education, it’s gone because of a much more anxious awareness of a plural society and not wanting to privilege one religious tradition over another. What to do about it? I’m not sure I have a quick answer. The good side of it is that if not everybody knows it the story isn’t necessarily boringly familiar. I once found myself speaking to a class of secondary school children in London, a rather deprived bit of London, in their religious studies class which was a bit of a baptism of blood in many ways. And none of them knew a thing about it. (Told them the Parable of the Good Samaritan which none of them had heard.) Telling someone one of the parables of Jesus for the first time is an extraordinary experience because you see why they are stories that change people’s frame of reference.”
— Rowan Williams
← Previous Post
Next Post →
