WOKE

Last week I presented a paper at the Oxford Symposium on Religious Studies at Queens College on the topic “The capacity of shared stories to function as myth and encourage inclusive participation.” Once I’ve put it into decent literary order you will be able to read it on my academia site and it will probably be a chapter in a book coming out of the symposium. One of the other presentations was given by Asger Trier, a Danish Jewish independent scholar and journalist, on the subject of “Woke.” He raised several important questions about cancel culture and platforming but then shocked me by suggesting that the pulling down of the statue of the Bristol slave trader Edward Colston was a step too far. I challenged him on this in the discussion after his paper with the result that we became good friends. He then asked if he could interview me for his TV channel, which we recorded the following afternoon. I think it raises interesting points about love’s response to conspiracy theories, populism and the reality of evil, as well as the Poverty Truth Commission among other things. You can watch it here: https://youtu.be/cwRk_hBlYbA The brief introduction is in Danish, of course, but the rest is English.

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