In the middle of last year, I did a blog post called "God is Back" based on an article in The Australian about a book by the same name. The theme of the book is the surprising rise of faith, spirituality and religion across the world our journey into an apparently more rational and secular age.In 1999, The Economist published God's obituary, but 7 years later had to change their tune. "God is Back: How the Global Rise of Faith is Changing the World". is written by John Micklewait (editor-in-chief on The Economist) and Adrian Wooldridge (Washington bureau chief of the London-based weekly magazine) and looks at the reasons why spirituality and religion have persisted in the modern world when many predicted that it would die off in a puff of well-reasoned secularism.
I haven't got anything much more to say about that. This post is really to point you toward a very charming and amusing ABC Radio National podcast of an interview between John Micklewait and Phillip Adams, Australia's best-known atheist. The interview, originally broadcast in July last year) is about the book (the podcast is also called "God is Back"). Adams, with good grace, bemoans the book's findings and, with his tongue firmly in this cheek, confesses his growing dislike for the author. The exchanges between the two are quite delightful.
The name "greenspace" came from a book I read once. It talked about a group of people who were trying to connect up their private world (blue spaces) with their public world (yellow spaces). The area of overlap that they were interested in, was the resulting "green" spaces. As I read the paper, go online, watch movies, listen to music etc, I am constantly wondering about how my personal spirituality should be intereacting with these public messages of meaning, purpose and yearning. This is what this blog is basically about...
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