Special Finale Webcast with Mike King

For more than two years UK Centre Managing Director Chris Parish and Kyrsten Perry, UK Director of Development, have been bringing the art of enlightened enquiry to hundreds of listeners with their popular weekly and fortnightly webcasts on Thursday evenings.  Capping this long line of stimulating discussions, Parish and Perry held their last webcast of the year on 24 September.  It was a true “grand finale”, with special guest Dr. Mike King.

King is the author of the highly acclaimed book, Secularism: The Hidden Origins of Disbelief.  In it he explores the roots of the face-off that has developed in recent times between secular culture and religion and makes the argument that the Enlightenment was all about improving religion, not getting rid of it.  In his newest work, Postsecularism:  The Hidden Challenge to Extremism, King takes his thesis even further.  He proposes a third way, one that goes beyond the extremism on both sides.

Editor Elizabeth Debold in the current issue of EnlightenNext magazine described King as ‘that rarest of breeds: an original thinker’.  The webcast proved how true that statement is.  King spoke eloquently and with precision about the ideas that inform his writings.  And he explained to the listening audience why he makes a distinction between “post-modernism” and “post-secularism.” Throughout the interview King revealed his impressive depth of knowledge and his unbridled enthusiasm for finding out for himself what has brought us to this particular moment in our cultural evolution.

Discover for yourself just how stimulating and thought-provoking a guest King was by listening to a recording of this final webcast here.  You’ll also find recordings of all of Parish and Perry’s webcasts at this link.  Though these lively, enlightened discussions on such a broad range of topics will be missed, they can be revisited again and again via the audio recordings.