To be a committed Christian in our world, we are, of course, supposed to embrace the notion that we are no more at home in our prosperous West than were the Chosen in Egypt or Babylon. I think one can be forgiven for feeling that the Land we inhabit has never been stranger, however. This is not just true for the committed Christian. It is so for all those who work in the world of art and ideas: striving to feel about us the communion of the creative saints, trying to realize the work of the Bachs and Mozarts, to illuminate the work of the Shakespeares and Dantes, to preserve all of it as a living heritage and use it as a tool to see beyond the concrete and finite world about us. For all this the past century has taken a toll. There are the distractions of mass events – war, economic upheaval – but also, what some may see as a coarsening of the cultural life of our societies. It is also apparent, however, that those who are attempting to push the horizons of scientific thought seem to be in the grip of a worldview that is, in the word of one critic – ‘flattened’ – looking inward, not outward – denying that there are forces and worlds beyond the immediate.
Confronting this ‘pressure’ is the gifted musician, theologian, pedagogue, and philosopher, Jeremy Begbie. He has been a force for furthering our understanding of the symbiosis