THE AIR WE BREATHE:
How we all came to believe in freedom,
kindness, progress and equality
By Glen Scrivener
The Good Book Company, 232 pages. £9.99
ISBN 978 1 784 987 497
Perhaps one of the casualties of our Twitter-debating world is the patience to see beyond emotive headlines and engage a topic thoroughly and fairly. The Air We Breathe is a welcome tonic to this – a relatively short book that floods light into the darkness of modern debate.
Scrivener skilfully uncovers the Christian roots that underpin our Western value system, demonstrating that concepts like equality, freedom and progress all find their roots in Jesus. Writing to engage Christians, non-Christians and those burnt by Christianity, he manages to intrigue and engage without getting caught up in the often-toxic debate that surrounds these issues. For example, when discussing equality, he doesn’t address issues like marriage equality but rather where the idea of equality comes from. When God became man in Jesus, he demonstrated that we have inherent worth – an alien concept to the Roman world into which Jesus was born, and something that sparked a change in how His followers treated those society ignored.
