This week the Jubilee Centre team explores David Olusoga’s article ‘The toppling of Edward Colston's statue is not an attack on history. It is history.’ Do statues in public places suggest veneration? How should we respond to difficult histories? And can we reimagine how we create and use statues of public figures?
David Olusoga’s article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/08/edward-colston-statue-history-slave-trader-bristol-protest
Recorded on Tuesday 9th June 2020
This week the Jubilee Centre team explores the Black Lives Matter protests, starting with Brandon Tensley’s article: ‘The protest pictures alone tell the story of America's racial hierarchy.’ We touch on antiracism, the American progress narrative and Britain’s colonial past. As ever, we ask, how can we think biblically about this? And what is the relationship between racism and sin?
Brandon Tensley’s article: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/29/politics/george-floyd-protests-american-racism/index.html
Recorded on Tuesday 2nd June 2020
This week the Jubilee Centre team unpacks Uscinski and Enders’s article ‘The Coronavirus Conspiracy Boom.’ It’s a conversation that explores conspiracy thinking – not just as something ‘other people’ do - but as an instinct in all of us. As ever, we ask how can think biblically about this issue? And what does it mean for Christians to be people of both faith and reason?
Joseph E. Uscinski and Adam M. Enders’s article: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/what-can-coronavirus-tell-us-about-conspiracy-theories/610894/
Further resources:
https://www.christianitytoday.com/edstetzer/2020/april/christians-and-corona-conspiracies.html
https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/expert-guide-to-conspiracy-theories-83678
Recorded on Tuesday 12th May 2020 as part of our podcasts during lockdown series.
This week the Jubilee Centre team unpacks Freddie Sayers’s article ‘Which epidemiologist do you believe?’ It’s a conversation that explores how we frame the pandemic based on our understanding of the telos of society. As ever, we ask, how can we think biblically about this issue? Specifically, can 2 Samuel 24 offer us insight into leadership and disaster?
Freddie Sayers’s article: https://unherd.com/2020/04/which-epidemiologist-do-you-believe/
Recorded on Tuesday 28th April 2020 as part of our Podcasts during the Lockdown series
Jonathan Tame unpacks the biblical foundations for social reform. He presents a biblical worldview for public engagement, articulates the importance of biblical Law and offers some suggested principles for political economy.
Knowing to whom we are accountable lies at the heart of integrity. Is it self, public opinion or God? We must distinguish self-referential integrity from a Christian understanding of integrity that is accountable to Christ. Integrity faces counter-currents and riptides capable of causing our scattered self to drift, sometimes to drown.
We will describe examples of these undercurrents to warn of their force; they are not always easy to discern and continually change direction and intensity to sweep us off our feet. We will also examine some of the flawed solutions that we fondly hope will be adequate to protect our integrity, but turn out to be a wholly inadequate selective moralism.
Finally, we will attempt to define the key ingredients of Christian integrity in terms of moral accountability, relational consistency and personal discipline.
This talk is based on Rodney Green's Cambridge Paper, available here.
Risk has become a central concept in modern life. We increasingly structure life around attempting to manage an uncertain future, in which more knowledge simultaneously provides safety and increases our awareness of what we do not know.
We make ‘risk decisions’ every day about our money, cycling to work, what we include in our diet. We have an overwhelming and sometimes apparently contradictory volume of knowledge at our disposal that may aid, but can obfuscate, our decisions.
However, whilst the risk society is a secular phenomenon, it provides an opportunity for Christians to live distinctively and attractively.
This talk is based on Amy Donovan's Cambridge Paper, available here.
Michael Schluter talks about the biblical foundations for social reform and the agenda for public life.
Part 1:
In the first of two talks by Michael Schluter given at the Jubilee Centre's Social Reformers Summer School, which took place in Cambridge in July 2016. The title was 'Biblical foundations for social reform', and he introduced the biblical basis for the work of the Jubilee Centre, and the various organisation which have emerged from it.
Part 2:
The second of two talks by Jubilee Centre's founder Michael Schluter, given at the Social Reformers Summer School, which took place in Cambridge in July 2016. In this talk he explains the relational approach to public policy which has been developed by the Jubilee Centre and the organisations which it launched, such as Relationships Foundation and the Relational Thinking Network.
Michael Schluter starts the 2010 series of three London Lectures by 'Thinking Relationally about Everything'.
From our 2011 Big Society and the Church conference, Dr Guy Brandon, Senior Researcher at Jubilee Centre and author of our report 'The Big Society in Context: A means to what end?' brings lessons from biblical Israel for our complex society.
