This is thinking in public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about

front-line theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them.

I'm Albert Mola your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville,

Kentucky.

For decades now, Oz Guinness has been on the front lines as an evangelical author, speaker, and also as social analyst.

He holds the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Social Sciences from Oxford University.

He's also a founder of the Trinity Forum Society and has served as a guest scholar at the

Woodrow Wilson Center for International Studies and as a visiting fellow at the Brookings

Institute. He's the author or editor of more than 30 books, including a free people suicide,

sustainable freedom, and the American future. That was the topic of a previous

thinking in public conversation. His most recent book is Fool's Talk, Recovering the Art of Christian

persuasion. I'm very thankful today to have in the studio Oz Guinness, Oz Welcome to

Thinking in Public.

Oz, it's an honor to have you here in the studio today.

Your story is really one of the most interesting stories of the 20th and 21st centuries amongst

evangelical Christians.

But it doesn't begin where many people might expect. It

actually begins in China. How did that happen? Well my parents are medical

missionaries and my grandparents before them. My grandfather was educated at Cambridge and went out and founded one of the first

Western hospitals and actually treated some of the royal family in the forbidden city and knew that generation and then my parents

were both born there and they got married just as war was breaking out with Japan.

So my two brothers and I were born in that terrible time where we had the Japanese

...