The Animating Force of Religious Faith

The public intellectual in journalism is a diminished figure, perhaps especially in Australia. The narrow specialisation of education and the distorting priority of ideology over merit conspire against the breadth of learning required for intellectual leadership, and the flattening effects of a secularised worldview fail to lift the gaze of promising writers to the animating force of religious faith.

Greg Sheridan is a notable exception. A lifelong journalist whose reputation is in international politics—as Foreign Editor of the Australian for nearly thirty years—he has long been alive to the underlying currents of culture and faith. He recognises that not only is politics downstream from culture, but that culture is downstream from faith. His worldview is not confined to this world, nor has he lived within the corridors of confined learning that pass for present-day educational enlightenment. His mind has a transcendental reach, so that it is open to the inexhaustible…