We are excited to resume our annual Austin Lecture on Monday, September 19 at 7 p.m. Please join us at Austin’s University Avenue Church of Christ to hear contributing editor Carl R. Trueman give a public lecture on “The Sentimental Death of a Culture.” To register for this event, please click here.
Lecture Abstract: Commenting on Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot declared that he “set up Culture in the place of Religion, and… left Religion to be laid waste by the anarchy of feeling.” Nearly a century on from Eliot’s comment, it is arguable that the same thing might now be said about culture: it is awash in an anarchy of feeling and of sentiment. Yet this is no more a firm foundation for culture than it was for religion. If this is the case, then perhaps the death of traditional religion through sentimentalism is not so much the result of religion mimicking the values of the world around, as religious conservatives often think, as it is a foretaste, a paradigm, of what is happening before our very eyes in the culture at large.
To give in support of the First Things Austin Lecture, visit www.firstthings.com/donate or write “Austin lecture” in the memo line. Thank you for your support!
