What I want to do is talk about what I see as the larger context.

This is going to be, I think, hopefully not an entirely unsatisfactory big think talk,

about the larger context for the political and social upheavals that we're all living through in the moment.

One way to describe it could be how I understand the populist upsurge of our time.

Why the upsurging populism?

What does it mean for us?

And then how religious believers ought to oppose it? what does it mean what does it mean for us and then what as what religious

believe how religious believers ought to approach this upsurge in populism that's

my agenda my agenda or my purpose today and you know one of the dangers of

being a journalist and I'm a recovering academic and now a fully paid up journalist, is that a journalist has to write over and over and over again.

And so you wind up saying the same things over and over and over again.

So I will apologize to anybody in this room where what I'm going to say

sounds too familiar. It's just one of the liabilities of what you do as a journalist, is that

you have to say the same thing over and over again. So last fall, I received a submission from

a young writer who lives in Australia. And we're still working to

try to get his piece into shape. But I was very struck by the last sentence of the submission

that he sent in. It ends in this kind of a resting sentence.

It reads those follows,

I'm a 27-year-old,

and I hope to live to see the end of the 20th century.

Now, I sympathize with the sentiment

behind this paradoxical aspiration,

...