Making the World Strange: the Church’s intellectual vocation

Since her conception the Church has seen herself as having a vocation to challenge the ideas that make the moral, political, and metaphysical claims of the Gospel unthinkable to the world around her. Yet when the Church becomes too at-home in the world we can begin to instead see our role as sanctifying whatever set of presuppositions makes us most comfortable with ‘the way things are.’ For this lecture Dave Taylor will argue that, rather than making itself ‘relevant’ or amenable to contemporary sensibilities, the Church must draw on her theological tradition to ‘make the world strange’, to question the unquestionable assumptions that our world is based upon.   Dave Taylor completed his master’s thesis in political theory in 2017 where he looked at the types of people and places that are included into nation-states only by way of their abandonment. Dave is the founder of PEACEtalks, and is co-host of the upcoming podcast Eucatastrophe which seeks to bring the Christian theological imagination to bear on pop-culture, politics, and social issues. He currently works as part of the research team at the Centre for Disability Studies and is a parishioner along with his wife Sarah at St John’s Anglican Church, Ashfield.