Early on in lecture 2, Wright makes the comment that one must ‘mind their manners’ if they want to preserve their spot with the cool kids at the ‘high table’ (which I guess is Wright’s way of referring to the liberal but still somewhat religous intelligentsia that cannot tolerate the thought of naive acceptance of pre-scientific dogmas.) That sparked the question for me (given all the rest of where Wright goes in this lecture and all the subsequent ones) - Has Wright been ostracised from the ‘cool kids’ table? He’s obviously been invited to give this prestigious lecture series, and he’s respected more in scholarly circles now (I’ll venture) than perhaps he would be in fundamentalist ones. And yet, where he’s taking us would make scholars squirm more than just a little, I’m thinking! As one who hovers near the edges of that end of things - he makes me shift a bit uncomfortably. Is Wright a quintessential scholar, who nonetheless here has entered the higher temples of intellectualism and begun a wholesale turning over of tables and driving out animals? That thought challenges me through these lectures.
Between 8 and 9 minutes in, Wright makes the interesting observation that … Even though the Reformers and the Rationalists wanted different things, they both disapproved of the medieval church - and as a result of that alliance, the Protestant Reformation got its energy from both, and thus the tradition became saddled with a lot of rationalist baggage.