Page 10 - Contact Autumn 2018
P. 10
‘How’, wrote the great Dorothy Sayers, whose 125th
birthday anniversary was celebrated in June, ‘can anyone
remain interested in a religion which seems to have no
concern with nine-tenths of his life?’
How indeed?
It was 1942 and Sayers was already nationally famous as
a ground-breaking detective novelist, a genre-breaking
evangelistic broadcaster, a forthright, if reluctant apologist,
and a formidable public intellectual. The sentence quoted
comes from her seminal essay on work where she lamented
‘the church’s failure to understand and respect the secular
vocation’. Her logic is irrefutable. Why indeed would anyone
remain interested in a religion that only addresses one-tenth
of their life?
