COMMENTARY: In the years to come, the Church may find itself poorer than ever before — and yet needed more than ever before.
It was the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, shortly before descending into madness, who wrote that “if we have our own why of life, we shall get along with almost any how.”
Nietzsche, famously hostile to Christianity, was certainly not thinking of Christ as the “why” of life but the maxim still stands. We are mostly built and conditioned for purpose-filled lives, one way or another.
I thought of this when I read of the apparent suicide last week of English academic Jason Arday, formerly of Cambridge University. Played out in the merciless and grim space of social media, it seemed that key parts of his life and academic career were rife with exaggeration and fabrication, that he had been richly and unfairly rewarded for this deception by academia and that the whole edifice of lies had come crashing down.
One academic critic — who blamed Cambridge University even more than Arday himself — was Nigel Biggar, an Anglican priest and ethicist formerly at Oxford University who is also a member (since 2017) of the
