We need to understand history to navigate our current cultural moment. According to Andrew Wilson, we especially need to understand the year 1776: all that led up to it and how it created the narrative of the West. In this episode we discuss the Enlightenment, romanticism, industrialization, and how the ideas they birthed shape the church and the world around us.
Notes:
Lydia mentions the composition of silence, it is titled 4'33'' by John Cage.
Jenna mentions C.S. Lewis' introduction to On The Incarnation: “We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century - the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?" - lies where we have never suspected it... None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.”
Resources mentioned:
Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West by Andrew Wilson
All Things Bright and Beautiful Episode 1: On Reading and "Lit" by Tony Reinke
You are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World by Alan O Noble
The Hunger Game Series by Suzanne Collins
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley