Iwan Russell-Jones

Iwan Russell-Jones is an award-winning filmmaker with more than 25 years experience as a producer and director at the BBC. His career has spanned a variety of genres and subject matter in both television and radio. Among the films he has produced and directed are two documentaries about the Christian dimensions of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s leadership in the civil rights movement - The Crucified King (2003) and MLK: American Prophet (2008) - and a film about the challenge of Jesus to contemporary culture called Who Do You Say I Am? (2007). He studied theology at the London School of Theology, and gained an MTh from the University of Aberdeen and a DPhil from the University of Oxford. He has taught at various theological institutions, including Columbia Seminary in Atlanta, where he was Associate Professor of Theology, Media and Culture.

2011 Forum Sessions

Luncheon Workshops

Standard Workshops

Luncheon Workshops

Jacques Ellul: A Christian Prophet for the Digital Age

French sociologist and theologian Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) spent a great deal of his life thinking and writing about what he believed to be the defining feature of our age – ‘technique’, a mentality, a way of thinking a acting that both produces technology, and that is imposed on human beings by technology. Although he wrote mainly before the explosion of PCs and computer chips, his biblical analysis has huge relevance for the Information Society. At a time when digital technologies are transforming patterns of behaviour across whole areas of culture, from industry and commerce to medicine, education, media and social relationships, what is happening to the human person? Jaques Ellul raises tough and challenging questions for anyone who wants to bear authentic witness to Jesus Christ in the Digital Age.

Standard Workshops

Fields of Praise: Facing up to the Religious Challenge of Sport in Contemporary Culture

Back in the second century, Tertullian observed that the sporting contests of his day, including the Olympic Games, involved 'forms both of worship and of pleasure'. In the 21st century sports fans still speak quite naturally of the great ‘rituals’ of their game, of life and death struggles, of teams who have experienced resurrection, of athletes who have achieved immortality. Is all this merely a manner of speech, an ironical use of language on the part of thoroughly secular people? Or does sport really feed a deeply religious need in contemporary society? Have its liturgies and rituals eclipsed those of the Christian Church?

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