Apologetics in the twenty-first century

There is a helpful article "Atheists, Archbishops, and Airport Novelists: Recent trends in Christian apologetics," by Greg Clarke in the latest CASE magazine.

He lists four positive trends

• God is well and truly centre-stage in global intellectual life.
• The affective dimension of apologetics is receiving new, and overdue, attention.
• Christianity is often now presented as a story, a very good story, and a story into which anyone can enter.
• The ethical discontents of secularism have become a pathway into discussion of the moral shape of Christianity.

The discouraging trend is "Too many centres of apologetic engagement are entwined with specific or institutionalised political commitments, to their detriment and to the confusion of the public..... If a project on the relationship between God and science ends up as bitter dispute about the politics of teaching evolution or creation in schools, it has probably not achieved its best end."