For Argument’s Sake
Michael wrote a response to an article by Stephen McAlpine, an evangelical pastor and blogger in Western Australia, on apologetics, which argued that the era of nice apologetics is over.
What is apologetics? It’s nothing to do with saying sorry but it’s giving a defence of the Christian message in the public square. Michael and Megan discuss Stephen’s contention that artful persuasion doesn’t work because it’s perceived as a mask for power.
The Discomfort Zone
Michael persuaded Megan to read God is Good For You by The Australian‘s Greg Sheridan (Read Greg’s profile here).
Megan wouldn’t have kept going after the first chapter’s polemic on the dire state of Christianity if she didn’t have to, but in the middle of the book she found some riches she really enjoyed. Michael likes Greg’s defence of Christianity as intellectually respectable but both feel that Greg glosses over the real problems that have afflicted the church.
Marg & Dave
For The Love of God, a documentary by the Centre For Public Christianity, by contrast, is very honest about the stuff that the church has done badly historically. Megan says it answers a lot of the things she had problems with in Greg Sheridan’s book but she has a quibble about the film’s coverage of women …
Less aggro, more conversation.
Is it even possible to have a deep discussion without it descending into chaos? Michael Jensen and Megan Powell du Toit think yes, and want to show the rest of us how to do it.
There’s plenty of things they disagree on: free will, feminism, where you should send your kids to school and what type of church you should go to. But there are also plenty of other things that they have in common. They want to talk about all these things with conviction. But they also want the conversation to be constructive. Tune in to find out if that’s possible.
