Diarmaid MacCulloch: belief

Transcript context

…To me, there’s something unique and special and lasting about C. S. Lewis. He writes fiction and nonfiction with success. Extremely smart, a tremendous writer. He’s both deep and very popular. Can the contemporary world produce another C. S. Lewis, or has that somehow become impossible? I doubt it’s impossible. I don’t quite share your universal admiration of Lewis. I think the children’s fiction is really quite manipulative. In which case, talking of children’s fiction, I would look to Philip Pullman, who, of course, isn’t a formal Christian believer, but seems to me to talk about profound issues in a way which can engage children very much. I guess one could look to Rowan Williams, and I would look to the poetry of our former Archbishop of Canterbury as perhaps his most lasting work. I would, of course, also look to T.S. Eliot, who, I guess, predates Lewis. Eliot says some very profound things connecting him to that tradition, which I know so well, that of Anglicanism. These things happen, and when you least expect them. Geniuses emerge like John Bunyan, ordinary man in 17th-century Bedfordshire, creating this extraordinary work of Christian meditation, though at the center of it are themes of which I am a little suspicious, Calvinist predestination. They keep coming, and I don’t think we should be worried about them never coming again. Has it surprised you how rapidly Anglicanism has declined? There are just fewer Anglicans, right? Arguably, the number one religion in England is Islam.…

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