Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Christian Humanist Podcast

I began to listen to the Christian Humanist Podcast (feed) as a follow up to the Jewish Humanist podcast Kol Hadash (feed) I discovered a couple of weeks ago (read my review of Kol Hadash). I learned from Kol Hadash to view the Jewish, or respectively the Christian, tradition as a cultural luggage I carry with me which can be taken seriously and therefore studied and taken to heart also for the secular. I was hoping to find a Christian pendant to Kol Hadash.

There is a website called The Christian Humanist which offers a load of articles along this line of thinking. However, a podcast they do not offer. The podcast with the same name, is not secular, it is openly confessional as they say. However, it is still a very interesting listen, also within the framework of looking at the Christian tradition as a substantial part of our (my) cultural baggage. Although the three hosts Michial Farmer, David Grubbs and Nathan Gilmour profess their faith and express themselves in the language of the believers and imply assumptions that I cannot identify with, I find we still have something in common. And that was an interesting find in itself.

What the Christian Humanist Podcast obviously attempts to do is to reconcile the Christian world view the presenters have with their other cultural luggage. The three are academics, versed in the humanities tended towards modern open-minded, rational, tolerant and liberal thinking. In that respect, they are not only the kind of humanists they identify with such as Erasmus and before that Thomas Aquinas and Augustin which results in very interesting issues such as the ones about Calvin, about politics or about the incarnation (to name a few I have listened to). They are also very similar to the non-believing secular, whether Christian or Jewish who just as much is trying to be a modern person with conscious historicity which leads him to understand and accept his connections with both the religious traditions he stands in as well as the secular, scientific, rationalistic etc.

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