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SUMMARY:The Bampton Lectures - Professor Alec Ryrie (University of Durham)
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20220510T113000
DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20220510T123000
UID:https://talks.ox.ac.uk/talks/id/ad0d9b95-6dcf-4211-9fe3-3cc42b8c0d6b/
DESCRIPTION:Lecture 2: The Age of Hitler\n\nTuesday 10 May at 11.30am in t
 he University Church\n\nThis lecture will show how\, during the lifetime f
 rom the 1940s to the present\, British\, American and many European cultur
 es have (in revealingly different ways) rebased their moral currency on th
 e secular narrative of the anti-Nazi struggle. The story has played out di
 fferently in the Anglophone world and in formerly occupied Europe\, and di
 fferently again in Germany’s far more painful and sophisticated reckonin
 g with its past. And yet across the western world\, the Second World War h
 as become our Trojan War and our Paradise Lost: a shared cultural point of
  reference\; the source of the only moral absolutes which pluralist societ
 ies recognise\; a rich and complex set of events which have an unparallele
 d grip on our collective imaginations and emotions\, and which we find our
 selves perpetually retelling and reinventing (and\, often\, trivialising).
  In the Anglophone world\, in particular\, the war and its moral lessons h
 ave become pervasive in the fictional narratives on which generations of c
 hildren have been raised\, from Tolkien to Star Wars and Harry Potter. The
  practical foundation of post-1960s secularism is that we may still believ
 e that God is good\, but not with the same ironclad certainty with which w
 e know that Nazism and all it stands for is evil.\n\nThe lecture will conc
 lude by arguing that this western moral consensus is now unravelling. The 
 war itself is falling off the edge of living memory\; new crises are disru
 pting old certainties\; a war between professedly Christian European power
 s no longer resonates so powerfully in plural societies and in a postcolon
 ial world. Or perhaps it is simply that the inherent tensions of a value- 
 system built on the anti-Nazi narrative can no longer be contained. In rec
 ent years it has become plain that our age’s moral consensus is fracturi
 ng\, with old truisms being questioned and new ones being asserted. Even a
 nti-Semitism\, the old horror that the anti-Nazi era defined itself agains
 t\, is re-emerging on both the Left and the Right. The postwar moral world
  is coming to an end: the question is what will come next.\nSpeakers:\nPro
 fessor Alec Ryrie (University of Durham)
LOCATION:The University Church of St Mary the Virgin\, High Street OX1 4AH
TZID:Europe/London
URL:https://talks.ox.ac.uk/talks/id/ad0d9b95-6dcf-4211-9fe3-3cc42b8c0d6b/
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DESCRIPTION:Talk:The Bampton Lectures - Professor Alec Ryrie (University o
 f Durham)
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