The Faithful Skeptic

Interview with NT Wright
Here's an excerpt of an interview with NT Wright in the National Catholic Reporter. This answer is in response to a question about whether abortion is the central religious issue of our time:

This is where I really would get quite angry with that point of view. Though I happen to agree with the stance on abortion, it seems blindingly obvious that it is not the big moral issue of our time. Global debt and the economic systems that were set up in 1944 with the Breton Woods Agreement, to slope the table so the money slides into the pockets of the Western banking system, at the cost of keeping most of the world in unpayable debt, seems to me as big a moral issue as slavery was 200 years ago. I and others intend to bang on about it until we achieve something. I just don't think we can say, "abortion is the issue."
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Yes, abortion matters, but all this matters much, much more. Just in terms of sheer quantity, there are millions more people whose lives are totally blighted by it. That's where I would go for starters. To play around with your Democratic presidential candidate, for example, seems to me to play with one particular pawn without noticing what's happening on the chessboard as a whole. When you see the whole, I think you have to say, let's try to address the big issues. If you haven't got the courage to do that, addressing the little issues of one particular person and his views on this or that looks like a displacement activity. It looks like something you do rather frantically in order to avoid having to talk about the elephant in the living room.

I would encourage reading the whole interview. It is a powerful commentary that articulates an ethic of life much more meaningful than anything in our current political environment.

There's also a lengthy discussion of homosexuality and the Anglican church. While I don't agree with his position on the issue, I have a great deal of respect for his thoughtful approach to it.

Link courtesy of Get Religion.

posted by Brian @ 9:59 AM