Writers Week welcomes candid friend of Christianity

"I was brought up in the presence of the Bible, and I remember with affection what it was like to hold a dogmatic position on the statements of Christian belief. I would now describe myself as a candid friend of Christianity." - Diarmaid MacCulloch

The New Zealand Festival is delighted to host one of Britain’s most distinguished living historians during Writers Week, 7-12 March 2014.

On 11 March Diarmaid MacCulloch will discuss his career to date and latest book, which looks at silence through Christianity, including prayer, meditation and purposeful forgetting. “If you discard doctrines which don’t work […] you then get rid of those noises and behind them you find the silence, which you might say is the silence of God.”

 

MacCulloch is Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University and the award-winning author of A History of Christianity: the First Three Thousand Years (2010) and Silence: a Christian History (2013). He was the presenter on BBC4 and BBC2 of "A History of Christianity - the first 3,000 years", which won the Radio Times Listeners' Award in 2010, "How God made the English" (BBC2, 2012) and "Henry VIII's fixer: the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell." He received a knighthood in January 2012 for services to scholarship.  “I fairly consciously stood on the edge of the church,” said MacCulloch, who is now “trying to share this luxury of being on the edge and looking in”.

Joining MacCulloch in another session on 8 March to discuss Having Faith in the 21^st Century is Francis Spufford, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and practising Christian whose latest book, Unapologetic, has been called a “muscular counter-attack against the arguments of Richard Dawkins et al” (Metro).   

The conversation will touch on faith and community in the modern world, and explore how both authors have reconciled their own beliefs within the confines of church doctrine.

Having Faith in the 21^st Century

8 March 12.15pm at Embassy Theatre
Tickets $18

Silence: A Christian History
11 March 1.45pm at Embassy Theatre
Tickets $18