It is 2008, and the world is well into a century which looks like being dominated by climate change, by China, and by the challenges of religious pluralism in a religious age. New Zealand is slowly turning its attention to all three. It is ill equipped to understand the third, because it has been ill-equipped to understand religion.
Overall, our small country has shallow intellectual soil – we rely heavily on a few voices canonised by the media to interpret the wider world for us. This is especially true for the wider world of ideas. Generally, we have been shaped by an unreflective pragmatism which has its strengths, but also makes us vulnerable; we can too easily accept the assumptions and confident assertions of others about the state of intellectual play in the rest of the world. Nowhere have we proved more vulnerable to this than in the field of religion.
