Hi All,
I have been thinking (in my usual lazy and intermittent way),
about the 'relevance' of MacMurray. I suggest that there is
at least one group to whom his work might be of central interest.
The group I mean is educated occidental churchgoers.
In his decade of greatest effort, the 1930's, he produced two
books - now out of print - 'Creative Society' and 'The Clue to
History' in which the effort to relate his Christianity to his
developed educated views and to the crises of the contemporary
world is a driving force and central theme of the writing.
Both books are now out of print - but I managed to buy them
from Amazon.com and they may well be available by interlibrary
loan. The reason why they are out of print, I suppose, is because
they are not remarkably successful. Indeed, it is easy for a
sharp-minded reader to find good reasons to dismiss them.
However, I suggest that the failures of these books are not
a reason to dismiss them because the failures of thought and
imagination involved are shared. MacMurray, as I've already
said, was not the only leftie to overvalue the Communist
experiment in Russia. And his view of the British Future as
expressed in the last chapters of 'Creative Society' was more
than a personal hope. It was shared by many.
The more I read these books the more I ask questions about
the reality of his Christianity, his social hopes, and the
relations between the two; and also the extent to which his
failures in this area are ways of understanding quite general
failures to assess probable futures realistically.
Ivan Sayer
You cannot give what you do not have
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John MacMurray and Christianity
Posted - 02/12/2005 : 19:22:22
