Os Guinness
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dr. Oswald "Os" Guinness is a writer and speaker living in Northern Virginia.
Born in China during World War II where his parents were medical missionaries. He was educated as a child at a boarding school in china. He had the very fortunate experience in his childhood of meeting Winston Churchhill. He remained in China until 1951 when the communists forced most foreigners to leave. Since then he has lived mostly in England, Switzerland, and the United States.
Educated in England, he did undergraduate studies at the University of London, and postgraduate studies at University of Oxford where he graduated with a D.Phil in the social sciences from Oriel College.
His first book, The Dust Of Death is a critique of the counterculture. His second, In Two Minds (1975) was recently rewritten as God in the Dark: The Assurance of Faith Beyond a Shadow of Doubt (Crossway, 1996). His third book, The Gravedigger File (1983), is an examination of the social and cultural forces shaping religion in the late twentieth century. He is the co-editor of Articles of Faith, Articles of Peace (1990) and No God But God: Breaking With the Idols of Our Age (Moody Press, 1992). One of his recent books is The American Hour, an analysis of the United States toward the close of the American Century, published by the Free Press in October 1992. He is also the author of Dining with the Devil: The Megachurch Movement Flirts with Modernity (Baker, 1993) and Fit Bodies, Fat Minds: Why Evangelicals Don't Think; (Baker, 1994), The Call (Word, 1998) and his most recent work, Time for Truth: Living Free in a World of Lies.
Since 1984, he has lived in the Washington, DC area. He was a Guest Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Studies and then a Guest Scholar and Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution. From 1986-1989 he was the Executive Director of the Williamsburg Charter Foundation, one of the drafters of the Williamsburg Charter, and co-author of the public school curriculum Living With Our Deepest Differences. He is currently the Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum, a seminar-style forum for senior executives and political leaders that engages the leading ideas of our day in the context of faith. He is a member of The Falls Church, Episcopal, in Falls Church, Virginia.
His deep concern is to bridge the chasm between academic knowledge and popular knowledge, taking things that are academically important and making them intelligible and practicable to a wider audience, especially as they concern matters of public policy. He has been involved in several projects in this area, including a BBC television documentary on the presidential election in 1980, a major public opinion survey, and the American Express study on the United States, America in Perspective.
Now, he often gives lectures to colleges and also to private schools, such as his lecture on November 8, 2006, which he gave to the Cambridge School of Dallas on "Freeing Families From Cultural Captivities."
[edit] See Also
- Henry Grattan Guinness great-grandfather to Os Guinness
- Mary Geraldine Guinness his great-aunt who wrote many biographies including one of his father and his aunt - her namesake in "Pearl's Secret"
- Gershom Whitfield Guinness Doctor and missionary father
