24 Apr Seeing, Suns and Cyberspace: Launching the Christian Heritage Blog

On behalf of the Christian Heritage team, I want to extend a warm welcome to Thinking in the Round, our new blog! Although we have done many things over the years, we have yet to venture into cyberspace in quite this way, and there is a mood of excitement in the air at CH HQ. Let me offer a few words of introduction to who we are, what we do and why we do it, and then lay out our hopes for this blog.

Christian Heritage has been based at the Round Church in Cambridge since the mid-1990s, and our initial focus was offering guided walks of Cambridge, with a view to telling the story of the transformative influence of Christianity on this university town. We still offer walks (three different varieties, in fact!) but since then have expanded our work to include exhibitions at the Round Church, termly lectures on Christianity and culture, and regular lunch conversations in our Scriptorium (writing room). We have also run events, summer schools and apprenticeship programs all geared towards relating the historic Christian faith to key questions our culture is asking.

Our desire is to show that Christianity, far from being an outmoded and culture-bound phenomenon, is ‘true truth’ (a term we borrow from one of our key inspirations, Francis Schaeffer), and presents satisfying answers to the most profound questions we can ask. If you have a look through our Media page, you will see from the range of topics we have addressed that we believe Christianity speaks to the whole person, and to every area of human life and learning. We hope and trust that you will find something which connects with your own interests and questions.

As our work expands, we want to make our resources available to a larger audience, including people who may not live in or around Cambridge. Among other things, this means launching a blog. We hope to do three main things here:

– Explore key cultural issues of our day from a Christian perspective (read more about our four core themes here)

– Engage with challenges to the Christian faith in the areas of history and culture

– Provide comment from a Christian perspective on events, books and ideas finding popular expression in the public square today

C.S. Lewis, whose last academic position was at the University of Cambridge, once wrote that he believed in Christianity as he believed that the sun had risen. ‘Not only,’ he explained, ‘because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.’* This blog is offered up in the hope that it might be a means of seeing our culture in the light of Christian truth and finding, in the origin of that light, the person of Jesus Christ, the truth, beauty and goodness that are only hinted at elsewhere.

* This comes from his essay, Is Theology Poetry?

Photo credit: Matt Noble