We conclude our annual Christian Voices programme with Dr Casey Strine.
Casey is a member of the History department at Sheffield University, where he is a Chancellor’s Fellow and a lecturer in the history of the ancient near East. Casey was born in the USA and spent five years working in management consultancy and IT project management before studying divinity. To get to know more about him we asked him a few questions.
Q: Hello Casey, what have you been doing over the last 6 months?
A: I’ve been doing a lot of writing about migration and the Bible in both the ancient world and the contemporary world. Most recently, I’ve written pieces for the Christians in Parliament APPG, the Huffington Post, and Real Clear Religion on what the Bible says about migration.
Personally, my wife and I welcomed our second son at the end of October 2016. Charlie and his older brother Jack (7) happily consume pretty much any of my time I’m not working.
Q: What difference has Christian faith made in your life?
A: My faith is the most important part of my life, guiding everything I do personally and professionally. One of my aims as an academic is to demonstrate both the benefits of having a faith that is fully engaged with the critical challenges of other ways of thinking and also the way it shapes one’s engagement with the pressing social issues of our day.
Q: If you could go for dinner with one famous person dead or alive today, who would it be and why?
A: Right now it would be Karl Marx. I think that Marx’s analysis of the problems existing in the relationship between the people who control financial resources and the people who work for them captures a critical issue generating so many problems in our world today. I doubt I’m sure I would disagree with Marx on loads of things, but I’d love to learn more about how he approached these issues.
Q: What was the first thing that made you passionate about your topic?
A: As a migrant myself, I suppose it is no surprise that I noticed how frequently migration features in the biblical texts. The more I recognized how much my experience of migration shaped my understanding of the world, the more convinced I became that scholars needed to appreciate how important this issue must have been in shaping the texts we have preserved in the Bible.
Q: In ten words or less, what can people expect from your talk?
A: A different view of the Bible: It is a collection of texts written by involuntary migrants to other involuntary migrants, often about the issue of involuntary migration.
You can hear Casey speak on the subject of: Migration: A pressing theological and ethical issue at 7:30pm on Wednesday 29 March at Ecclesall All Saints’ Church.