Making Christianity Weird Again

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Making Christianity Weird Again
By Tracey Rowland
It’s rare for me to hold a fashionable position but I am delighted to be in the company of high-profile people, from the historian Tom Holland to Bishop Robert Barron and the authors Michael Frost and Nijay Gupta, who all recommend making Christianity “weird” again.
For Catholics this means putting our way-laid ecclesial car into reverse and backing out of the correlationist ditch theologians—notably with Flemish surnames—got us into in the 1970s.
“Correlationism” was the pastoral strategy of correlating the faith to the culture of modernity. In the 1970s it took such banal forms as festooning Catholic classrooms with posters featuring cute animals declaring “Jesus is cool.”
More recently, I read a report of the homily given at the parish church attended by the British royal family this Christmas. The vicar was reported to have held up a Terry’s Orange chocolate. This is a popular chocolate in the …