Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
11 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“I don’t quite share your universal admiration of Lewis. I think the children’s fiction is really quite manipulative.”
02 / belief
“I think one way you can account for it is by saying that the New Testament is written by the winners in a very particular conflict, and that is the conflict as to who is going to lead the church after Jesus.”
03 / evaluation
“I think you’re comparing apples and carrots, really, because what you’d be examining with Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus is a religion based on practice, not on systematic thought or theology.”
04 / commitment
“Yes, we must — I’m sure we will — talk about the importance of the 12th century in the West, which transformed so many different things about marriage and sex.”
05 / evaluation
“I think we, with a Western tradition, often forget how absolutely unusual that is within world religions, to have a single form of a religion absolutely dominating everything within a particular continent.”
06 / prediction
“It’s the 12th century when Jews ceased to allow polygyny in such circumstances. I suspect that is because the pressures of Western society around them.”
07 / evaluation
“Martin Luther’s concept of the old church, the church he was rejecting, was one which had played a huge confidence trick on the laity of Europe by saying that clergy are special, and the way we’re going to make them special is by making them celibate. So, making all clergy married, which is effectively what happened in the Protestant Reformation, absolutely transforms the rules on marriage and sexuality generally because from then on, actually, the clerical family is the model of the Christian life.”
08 / evaluation
“They climb by being clever, and they climb by the fact that the first two Tudor monarchs did encourage them to do so because Henry VII, the first of the Tudor monarchs, was the most unlikely person in English history to become a monarch.”
09 / evaluation
“Foucault made absurd assertions about the invention of homosexuality in the 19th century, simply because the word was coined in 1869.”
10 / evaluation
“You may remember that, in the days of the communist regime in Eastern Europe, organ recitals were crowded out because of the way that the general public could connect with the transcendent in a regime which denied the transcendent.”
11 / evaluation
“At the center of it is still the Church of England, and the Church of Rome has done reasonably well in recent years because it’s constantly being replenished from outside the country by immigration.”