A New Apologetics: Speaking of God in a world troubled by Religion

Abstract

One way of thinking about the current status of religion in public life s to frame it within the paradigm of the “post-secular”. Whilst this denotes in part the ‘new visibility’ of religion in global politics and the reappraisal of the assumptions of classic secularization theory, it is also an attempt to capture the trends of religious resurgence whilst noting the resilience of secularism as a default position for much public debate. Even if we adopt the conceptual framework of the post-secular, it is by no means clear how society might negotiate the unprecedented co-existence of these two trajectories of ‘secular’ and ‘sacred’. In a world that is more sensitive than ever to religious belief and practice, yet often struggles to accommodate it into secular discourse, how should we handle the unprecedented co-existence of these two discourses? And in particular, how do Christians give an account of the theological well-springs of their commitments in ways that are accessible and comprehensible to an ever more fragmented and sceptical body politic?