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Kevin Moss is Director of Operations at Christian Heritage and a PhD candidate in intellectual history. In the wake of the recent insanities on Capitol Hill, I have taken to re-reading Gertrude Himmelfarb’s excellent book, On Looking Into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society. Published in 1994, it is perhaps unlikely that Himmelfarb (who died towards the end of 2019) would have anticipated these events, as unlikely as it would have been for John Stuart Mill to have anticipated the outworking of his thesis, On Liberty, the book which has been a foundational influence on modern liberalism. Mill’s work benefits from a very clear-sighted critique in Chapter IV of Himmelfarb’s book, entitled Liberty: “One Very Simple Principle”? which demonstrates that the kind of reductionism at the heart of On Liberty has not weathered the passage of time very well. Indeed, the clue to the fundamental weakness in Mill’s optimism about liberalism is to be found in another of his essays, Nature, written only a few months before he commenced On Liberty. It would be difficult to find two views of human nature which had less in common, but it was the naïvely optimistic one which prevailed, because it was...

Kevin Moss is a Christian Heritage trustee and PhD candidate in intellectual history. One of the many joys of historical research is that one gets to meet great minds that have somehow fallen through the cracks of popular history.  One such, for me, has been Johann Georg Hamann (1730-88), a profound German Enlightenment thinker with a propensity for dark and enigmatic writings.  In recent years, there has been a gentle flourishing of translations of his literary contributions (many remain untranslated from the German), and I have recently benefited enormously from John R. Betz’ After Enlightenment, the Post-Secular Vision of J. G. Hamann (2012, Wiley-Blackwell). Hamann’s is an unusual mind, given his context.  He turned from the sterility of continental Enlightenment to a robust, evangelical Christian faith – and in that turning became something of a focus for secular acquaintances who regarded his sincere faith as an affront to their values.  Through their influence, he was introduced to Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) in the hope that the great philosopher would reclaim this errant Enlightenment heretic, but what actually emerged was an improbable friendship, one where Hamann certainly gave as good as he got.  Essentially, Hamann provided one of the best, and certainly one of...

Cambridge Saturday School of Theology 2009. The second talk of Ranald Macaulay's two part series on Rekindling the Vision.   [embed]https://roundchurchcambridge.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/11193721/ranald-macaulay-rekindling-the-vision-part-2.mp3[/embed]...

Cambridge Saturday School of Theology 2009. The first talk of Ranald Macaulay's two part series on Rekindling the Vision.   [embed]https://roundchurchcambridge.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/11193551/ranald-macaulay-rekindling-the-vision-part-1.mp3[/embed]...

Cambridge New Testament scholar Dirk Jongkind details compelling approaches to the reliability of the Gospels.   [embed]https://roundchurchcambridge.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/11180610/dirk-jongkind-approaches-to-the-reliability-of-the-gospels.mp3[/embed]...

Daniel Strange presents an historical view of how Christianity has impacted life in the UK.   [embed]https://roundchurchcambridge.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/11175501/strange-shaping-of-a-nation-impact-of-christianity-in-uk.mp3[/embed]...

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