It was the great Reformed theologian Karl Barth who once observed, for spiritual leaders, that they ought to preach (or teach) "with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other."
I keep turning that idea around in my head, as I work as an ethicist. It seems that need to speak to the real questions that people are asking, or think they are asking.
One of the frustrations that I find is that, when people talk about Christianity, they often have little or no idea of what basic Christianity is about. They have the strangest notions in their heads -- and link to Christianity things that are completely foreign to that understanding of life or the world.
Now that's a challenge.
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