Religion is Dead. Long Live Religion.

A zoom moot

During World War II, a man sits in a Nazi prison, suspected of involvement in the resistance movement. He writes letters to a friend. As a church pastor and theology lecturer, he is alarmed by his own thoughts. The world, he says, cannot be religious anymore. The world has come of age. Pushing the world back into the childhood of religion feels false and unethical, he says.

Meanwhile, a Jewish marxist is fleeing across Europe to escape the Nazis. He writes as he goes about the course of history. He describes the strange image of a turkish robot playing chess, but says a theologian is hidden under the table, fixing the whole game. Despite all the efforts of modernity to disenchant and rationalise the world, theology, he says, is everywhere.

This Sunday I’ll be hosting my first monthly Zoom Moot.

We’ll be talking about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Walter Benjamin, and this paradoxical threshold when religion both collapses and emerges in the same moment. Perhaps we can begin to feel out the strange religious climate of the present together. There’ll be some Marshall McLuhan too.

Sun 25th June, 9pm

£10 to join

Free to all £5 subscribers here, or on Patreon

Send me a message and I’ll send you a link

DBB