Sunday 16 May 2010

More on James Davison Hunter’s To Change the World

James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 368pp., ISBN 9780199730803.

I posted on this as ‘forthcoming’ here and here. I deliberately held back from purchasing a copy until it was available in the UK, but it’s been available in the USA long enough to generate a significant amount of initial responses.

Interestingly, the gist of some of Hunter’s ideas were presented in a 2002 Briefing from the Trinity Forum, available as a pdf here.

More recently – on 6 April 2009 – Hunter presented the Stan Kimmitt Lecture on Public Service at the University of Montana on ‘Public Service and the Idea of a Changing World’ (with an audio file of the lecture available here).

Christianity Today carries an interview with Hunter, under the title ‘Faithful Presence’, with the interviewer (Christopher Benson) asking him a number of challenging questions.

Christianity Today also includes responses from Chuck Colson (‘More than Faithful Presence’) and Andy Crouch (‘Hunter and I Agree on Culture Making (He Just Seems Not to Know It)’), who have also made significant contributions to the broader debate.

It will be interesting for those of us outside the US context to reflect on the significance of Hunter’s work – and the responses it is generating – to our own place.

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