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In our current economic climate, especially in this city, people are constantly thinking about their work. What does the church have to say? In the mid-twentieth century, essayist Dorothy Sayers wrote:
 

"In nothing has the Church so lost her hold on reality as in her failure to understand and respect the secular vocation.  She has allowed work and religion to become separate departments, and is astonished to find that, as a result, the secular work of the world is turned to purely selfish and destructive ends, and that the greater part of the world’s intelligent workers have become irreligious, or at least, uninterested in religion.”  

  

These are bold words, but many would agree that they are as true now as they were then. Christians ought to be able to present a powerful vision of work that extends far beyond its pragmatic value and passionately connects with the sovereign nature and redemptive purpose of Christ. The need for the church to engage and provide vision for the meaning and significance of work is greater now than it has been for generations.

Graceful Citizenship - A Conversation on Christian Civility and the Common Good

CFW hosts the Center for Public Justice, featuring Michael Gerson & Gideon Strauss

Michael Gerson is a nationally syndicated columnist who appears twice weekly in the Washington Post. He is the author of Heroic Conservatism and co-author of City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era. Gerson serves as Senior Advisor at ONE, a bipartisan organization dedicated to the fight against extreme poverty and preventable diseases. He serves on the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, the Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Committee on Conscience, the Board of Directors of Bread for the World, the Initiative for Global Development Leadership Council, and the Board of Directors of the International Rescue Committee. He is co-Chair of The Poverty Forum and Co-Chair of the Catholic/Evangelical Dialogue with Dr. Ron Sider.

From 2006 to 2009, Gerson was the Roger Hertog Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Before joining CFR in 2006, Gerson was a top aide to President George W. Bush as Assistant to the President for Policy and Strategic Planning. He was a key administration advocate for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the President's Malaria Initiative (PMI), the fight against global sex trafficking, and funding for women’s justice and empowerment issues. Prior to that appointment, he served in the White House as Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of Presidential Speechwriting and Assistant to the President for Speechwriting and Policy Advisor. Gerson is a graduate of Wheaton College in Illinois. He grew up in the St. Louis area and now lives with his wife and sons in northern Virginia.

 

 

Gideon Strauss is a senior fellow with the Center for Public Justice, where he previously served as Chief Executive Officer and editor of Capital Commentary. Before joining the Center for Public Justice, Strauss served as editor of the journal Comment at the think tank Cardus (previously known as the Work Research Foundation), and as the Research and Education Director of the Christian Labour Association of Canada.

Strauss completed his PhD in social philosophy at the then University of the Orange Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa, with a dissertation on the ethics of public welfare. A native of South Africa, he served as an interpreter for the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission under Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Gideon is married to Angela, who is a graduate student at Fuller Theological Seminary, and has two daughters, Tala and Hannah, both students at Gordon College.

 

 

 

Jeremy Begbie is the inaugural holder of the Thomas A. Langford Research Professorship in Theology at Duke Divinity School, North Carolina, and founding Director of Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts. He teaches systematic theology, and he specializes in the interface between theology and the arts. His particular research interest is the interplay between music and theology. He is also Senior Member at Wolfson College, Cambridge, and an Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculties of Divinity and Music at the University of Cambridge. Previously he has been Associate Principal at Ridley Hall, Cambridge, and Honorary Professor at the University of St Andrews where he directed the research project, Theology Through the Arts at the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts. He is author of a number of books, including Voicing Creation’s Praise: Towards a Theology of the Arts (T & T Clark); Theology, Music and Time (CUP), and most recently, Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music (Baker/SPCK) which won the Christianity Today 2008 Book Award in the Theology/Ethics Category. He is a professionally trained and active musician, and has taught widely in the UK, North America and South Africa, specializing in multimedia performance-lectures.

Event Details here...

 

 

Peter Harris is Founder and President of A Rocha, the story of which conservation biologist E.O. Wilson has called “a unique and inspiring epic.” Harris graduated from Cambridge University in English Literature and Religious Studies. Following three years’ teaching literature at Christ’s Hospital, further theological training and then work as an Anglican minister near Liverpool, UK, he and his wife Miranda moved to Portugal to establish and run A Rocha’s first field study centre and bird observatory. In 1995 the work was given over to national leadership and they moved to France where they oversaw the establishment of two other centres while travelling to resource the growing movement of Christians active in nature conservation. A Rocha field projects are now operational in twenty countries worldwide. The story is told in Peter’s books Under the Bright Wings (1993) and Kingfisher’s Fire (2008). Harris is a contributor to over ten other titles that explore the relationship between Christian mission and environmental concern, and has served as Adjunct Faculty at Regent College, Vancouver and Au Sable Institute, Michigan.

 

Eugene Peterson has written “Peter Harris is a persistent and most convincing witness that the Christ who saves and the Christ who creates are one and the same Christ, that the care and celebration of creation is essential to a full evangelical witness of the Gospel of salvation.”

Event Details Here...

 

 

GOSPEL& CULTURE 2010-11 SERIES AUDIO AVAILBLE HERE