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Tue 13Tue 13Mon 10Mass Culture: Theological Engagement and Spiritual Practice
Mon 10 May, 2:00 pm to Thu 13 May, 2:00 pmMeet the Academic Staff
Karen O’Donnell
Coordinator, Centre for Contemporary Spirituality Read more
James Steven
Academic Dean and Coordinator for the Centre for Liturgy and Worship Read more
Jayme Reaves
Coordinator, Centre for Encountering the Bible and Short Courses Read more
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- This event has passed.
Preaching in a Disenchanted Age
- Course Dates: Tue 6 June 2017, 10:00 am to 4:00 pm

One of the great challenges of preaching today is that we preach to people who are not simply weary of religion or distracted from the life of faith by a busy world.
Rather, we preach to people who have radically different ways of thinking than previous generations. Many, if not most, people today lack what our ancestors took for granted: a perception of God present and active in the fabric of everyday life. That awareness has been replaced with a single-minded focus on scientific knowledge and rational logic. Some have called this change “secularity,” and others have called it “disenchantment.” Either way, it’s a new environment in which preaching happens, and the question is, “How can we possibly preach to this age?”
During this day we will explore how preachers might speak to a disenchanted age by taking up three specific “languages” of preaching: the language of enchantment (which seeks to re-enchant the imaginations of hearers), the language of wisdom (which seeks to describe faithful living not as an abstraction but in practical, on-the-ground ways), and the language of disruption (which seeks to shake the foundations of the assumed world).