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Reflections on the Quiet Revival (Jim Paul, English L'Abri worker)

July 17, 2026

In April 2025, the Bible Society published a report which showed a 'Quiet Revival’ in UK churches, with a surprising increase in young people attending church. Since then, the results of this study have been discredited. Nonetheless, there does currently appear to be a cultural change in attitudes to Christian faith in the UK and Europe, with many anecdotes of young, unchurched people coming to faith. In this lecture I will be exploring some possible causes for this change, what we can learn ...

The Rashomon Effect: Narratives of Doubt and Consensus from the Age of the Book to Game (Dr. Mike Sugimoto, Professor of Asian Studies at Pepperdine University in California)

July 16, 2026

What does it mean for a society or individual to believe things in common, when contemporary society is marked increasingly by customized news sources, a collapse of consensus, loss of societal authority, and the normalization of doubt? Rashomon, the 1951 landmark film by Akira Kurosawa, shook the notion of a single narrative account of a crime by presenting multiple, conflicting viewpoints — marking the postwar collapse of binding narratives concerning Japanese society. This lecture explores...

Freedom from the Lie of Proof (Chris Swanson, President, Gutenberg College, USA)

July 13, 2026

Our culture's crisis of confidence in knowledge is the culmination of a long history of the search for certainty. The Bible's picture of knowing, however, rests on fundamentally different assumptions and thus restores our confidence in seeking and knowing the truth.Please note that the ideas expressed in this lecture do not necessarily represent the views of L’Abri Fellowship.For more resources, visit the L'Abri Ideas Library at labriideaslibrary.org. The library contains over two thousand le...