When I was a student in music, going through A-levels and then my undergraduate degree, there was a phase that just about every student went through, when we loved the music of Benjamin Britten. Somehow each of us in turn ‘discovered’ this man’s music and fell in love with it. We appreciated it because it was our access to ‘modern’, aka 20th-century music, but carried enough undertones of romanticism and beauty not to alienate us unlike Schönberg or Stockhausen. Enamoured students would present seminars on the Four Sea Interludes or (in my case) The Turn of the Screw. We had to tell our professors how great this man’s music was – who were probably secretly bored stiff with hearing about Britten but wore a smile as we got through our phase.
Well, maybe I’m having a bit of a Tom Wright phase – I think many students of theology experience this – but the man really does know how to communicate. And what he has to communicate isn’t tosh. It’s some of the best New Testament scholarship in this or the last century.
Wright’s latest book is called “How God Became King” and I stumbled across a video linked from the N.T Wright page. The link to the video is: http://www.calvin.edu/january/2012/NTWright.htm – and it’s seriously worth a watch.
Ben David Trigg 