The Church Times Podcast

On this week’s podcast, Malcolm Guite takes us on a journey through the “Great O Antiphons”: seven prayers which the Church prayed during the first centuries, which called afresh for Christ to come. Malcolm reads each of the seven prayers and reflects on them, and offers his own poetic response to each one, taken from his collection Sounding the Seasons: Seventy Sonnets for the Christian year (Canterbury Press). Malcolm is posting daily Advent reflections and sonnets on his website: htt//malcolmguite.wordpress.com/tag/o-antiphons/ This talk was first broadcast on 28 November during an online Advent retreat, hosted by the Church Times and Canterbury Press. Malcolm’s latest collection of Poet’s Corner columns, A Heaven in Ordinary: A Poet’s Corner collection, is published by Canterbury Press and is available from the Church Times Bookshop. The Church Times Podcast will return in the new year. We wish all our listeners a very Happy Christmas. Picture credit: KT Bruce Try 10 issues of the Church Times for £10 or get two months access to our website and apps, also for £10. Go to churchtimes.co.uk/new-reader.

Piranesi, the long-awaited second novel by Susanna Clarke, has been published to critical acclaim. Last month, it was shortlisted for the 2020 Costa Book Awards. Clarke’s 2004 novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, has sold more than four million copies worldwide and been adapted into a BBC television series. After its publication, Clarke suffered from a debilitating illness which made it difficult for her to write. On this week’s podcast, Sarah Lothian interviews Susanna Clarke about how she came to write Piranesi and about how her faith has developed over the course of her illness. She says: “I remember someone once saying that Christianity was very simple. And I thought, ‘Well, it might have a simplicity, but it’s not a simplicity that, I think, is necessarily easily grasped by human beings.’ “I feel I’m struggling towards faith, a simpler, more childlike faith, but I’m trying to get rid of all the neuroses and the difficulties that have accumulated like barnacles, and scrape them off and get back to simplicity.” Piranesi is published by Bloomsbury at £14.99 in hardback (Church Times Bookshop £13.49). Try 10 issues of the Church Times for £10 or get two months access to our website and apps, also for £10. Go to churchtimes.co.uk/new-reader.

On this week’s podcast, Ed Thornton talks to Hannah Malcolm about a new book that she has edited, Words for a Dying World: Stories of grief and courage from the global Church. “I wanted to help people to think about the ways that grief over the world isn’t about death in abstraction. . . The ways that we grieve the world will be particular to the places we come from and the things we’ve experienced. "And we don’t come from the same places, so we have a great deal to learn from the grief of people who have different experiences to us and dialogue with those different experiences can make our understanding of this kind of grief richer.” You can read extracts from the book in this week’s Church Times. Hannah is an ordinand and PhD candidate at Cranmer Hall, Durham, and was the winner of the 2019 Theology Slam competition (News, Comment, 15 March 2019). Words for a Dying World is published on Monday (7 December) by SCM Press at £15.99 (Church Times Bookshop £12.99) Try 10 issues of the Church Times for £10 or get two months access to our website and apps, also for £10. Go to churchtimes.co.uk/new-reader.

Seven years after marrying a Christian, Stina Kielsmeier-Cook’s husband decided that he didn’t believe anymore. On this week’s podcast, Vicky Walker interviews Stina about what happened next, and how a group of nuns helped her to navigate her own beliefs. Stina recounts her experiences in a new book, Blessed Are The Nones (IVP, £11.99 (Church Times Bookshop £10.79)). Read an extract, and an edited summary of this interview, in this week’s Church Times. “In the book, I tell the story of one year of my life, of continuing to reckon with this grief and trying to understand,” Stina says. “So, now what? How do I live a Christian life when my husband isn’t a Christian any more? And so this term ‘spiritual singleness’ comes to me during a walk in the woods. . . It was a really helpful term for me, because it named the experience that I was going through when I was still happily married, still very much committed and in love with my husband, and yet there was this loneliness I was experiencing.” As she sought t make sense of her own faith in light of her husband’s deconversion, Stina “stumbled across” a group of Catholic sisters in her neighbourhood. “I wondered if there was something I shared with them because they had committed to this singleness,” she says. But she discovered: “They don’t consider themselves spiritually single in the way that I considered myself spiritually single, and that points to this discovery: that none of us can live a Christian faith on our own; there is a body of Christ to which we all belong.” Picture credit: Katzie & Ben Photography Try 10 issues of the Church Times for £10 or get two months access to our website and apps, also for £10. Go to churchtimes.co.uk/new-reader.

On this week’s podcast, Canon Mark Oakley speaks about how to preach when you haven’t got anything to say. This talk was given at the 2020 Church Times Festival of Preaching, which took place virtually in late September (News, 9 October). “A good sermon is not ultimately about information, but formation. It’s not a river of argument we have to follow to get to the end. It should be a fountain from which people can draw. And that means it can be unsystematic, creative, poetic, as open-ended as the parable preaching of Jesus. “St Ambrose taught that it did not suit God to save his people through logic. We might just be seeking the words as springboards to something better. They’re not to be perfect in themselves, and, if they’re not coming easily, they may be stalling as something a bit more truthful is trying to be born.” Canon Oakley is Dean of St John’s College, Cambridge. His books include The Splash of Words: Believing in poetry (Canterbury Press), which won the 2019 Michael Ramsey Prize (News, 30 August 2019). Read an edited transcript of Professor Anna Carter Florence’s Festival of Preaching talk on Ezekiel in this week’s Church Times. Picture credit: David Hartley/Church Times Try 10 issues of the Church Times for £10 or get two months access to our website and apps, also for £10. Go to churchtimes.co.uk/new-reader.

On this week’s podcast, the editor of the Church Times, Paul Handley, talks to the Bishop of Coventry, Dr Christopher Cocksworth, about the Living in Love and Faith (LLF) project, which he chaired. The LLF project was set up in 2017 by the House of Bishops in an attempt to break the deadlock over same-sex relationships. The committee behind the project has published what it calls “a suite of resources”, which includes videos, podcasts, an online learning hub for further reading, and a five-week course, which is being commended for study by parishes — for example, during Lent. Central to all these is a 480-page book, Living in Love and Faith: Christian teaching and learning about identity, sexuality, relationships and marriage, which contains a distillation of the project’s findings Bishop Cocksworth says: “One of the keys to the project is that we’re not just looking at single issues. We’re trying to look at the whole framework of relationships.” Read more about the LLF project in this week's paper and on our website: www.churchtimes.co.uk/topics/living-in-love-and-faith Living in Love and Faith is produced by Church House Publishing at £19.99; Church Times Bookshop, £17.99. The online resources can be found at churchofengland.org/LLF. Try 10 issues of the Church Times for £10 or get two months access to our website and apps, also for £10. Go to churchtimes.co.uk/new-reader.

During the first lockdown, with public worship suspended, parish churches needed to make use of digital technology to broadcast services. Help has been provided by the digital team at Church House, led by the C of E’s head of digital communications Adrian Harris. On this week’s podcast, Ed Thornton talks to Adrian and his colleague Amaris Cole, senior digital communications manager, about how churches have embraced digital technology during the pandemic, and what the challenges are in the second lockdown. They also talk about the C of E’s Advent and Christmas campaign, Comfort and Joy, which seeks to provide consolation and hope at this difficult time (News, 9 October) The official Comfort and Joy booklet of reflections can be purchased at www.chpublishing.co.uk/comfortandjoy Try 10 issues of the Church Times for £10 or get two months access to our website and apps, also for £10. Go to churchtimes.co.uk/new-reader.

Churches have been supporting the footballer Marcus Rashford’s call to tackle half-term hunger this week, after MPs voted against a Labour motion to extend free school-meal vouchers to the school holidays. The Revd Lizzi Green, Assistant Curate of Gossops Green and Bewbush, in the diocese of Chichester, has personal experience of food insecurity. She writes in this week’s Church Times: “I am all too aware of the effects of childhood poverty. Both my parents worked, but had to stop, owing to disability. “I was in junior school the first time that my family was threatened with eviction. I was convinced that it meant that we would be living on the streets, and ran around our flat making sure that I’d packed extra teddies and jumpers in my school bag for me and my siblings. I didn’t eat breakfast for most of secondary school. At first, I convinced myself that eating that early made me feel ill. Later, because I wasn’t used to it, that became reality. “Years later, this is still the reality for children across the country.” On this week’s podcast, Lizzi talks about her experience, and the food poverty she has witnessed among children in her parish. And explains why she thinks the Government should change its mind about free-school meals during the school holidays. Try 10 issues of the Church Times for £10 or get two months access to our website and apps, also for £10. Go to churchtimes.co.uk/new-reader.

Everybody Now is a podcast about what it means to be human on the threshold of a global climate emergency, in a time of systemic injustice and runaway pandemics. Scientists, activists, farmers, poets, and theologians talk bravely and frankly about how our biosphere is changing, about grief and hope in an age of social collapse and mass extinction, and about taking action against all the odds. On 19 October 2020, Everybody Now is being released by podcasters all over the world as a collective call for awareness, grief, and loving action. With contributions from: Dr Gail Bradbrook, scientist and co-founder of Extinction Rebellion Professor Kevin Anderson, Professor of Energy and Climate Change at the University of Manchester Dámaris Albuquerque, works with agricultural communities in Nicaragua The Rt Revd Dr Rowan Williams, theologian and poet, and a former Archbishop of Canterbury Pádraig Ó Tuama, poet, theologian, and conflict mediator Rachel Mander, environmental activist with Hope for the Future John Swales, priest and activist, and part of a community for marginalised people Zena Kazeme, Persian-Iraqi poet who draws on her experiences as a former refugee to create poetry that explores themes of exile, home, war, and heritage Flo Brady, singer and theatre maker Hannah Malcolm, Anglican ordinand, climate writer, and organiser Alastair McIntosh, writer, academic, and land rights activist David Benjamin Blower, musician, poet, and podcaster Funding and Production: This podcast was crowdfunded by a handful of good souls, and produced by Tim Nash and David Benjamin Blower (www.nomadpodcast.co.uk). Permissions: The song Happily by Flo Brady is used with permission. The song The Soil, from We Really Existed and We Really Did This by David Benjamin Blower, used with permission. The Poem The Tree of Knowledge by Pádraig Ó Tuama used with permission. The Poem Atlas by Zena Kazeme used with permission. The Poem What is Man? by Rowan Williams from the book The Other Mountain, used with permission from Carcanet Press. The Church Times Podcast will return next week (30 October). Try 10 issues of the Church Times for £10 or get two months access to our website and apps, also for £10. Go to churchtimes.co.uk/new-reader.

This week, Ed Thornton talks to the historian and author Tom Holland about a new collection of essays he has edited, Revolutionary: Who was Jesus? Why does he still matter? (SPCK). “If you regard Jesus as just an enlightened teacher, then, ultimately, he’s no different to philosophers, teachers from other periods of history. . . But if what the gospels, the New Testament, the Church teaches is true, then the strangeness is so strange that it must surely animate everything that Christians say about the figure of Jesus.” The book available from the Church Times Bookshop for the special price of £15.99. It features contributions from Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and non-religious writers. They include Rowan Williams, Terry Eagleton, Amy-Jill Levine, Tarif Khalidi, and Julian Baggini. An extract from the book is published in this week’s Church Times. Tom was interviewed on the podcast last year about his book Dominion: The making of the Western Mind (Little, Brown), which is now out in paperback. The interview was also published in the Church Times. His previous books include Rubicon: The triumph and tragedy of the Roman Republic and Dynasty: The rise and fall of the house of Caesar, both also published by Little, Brown. Picture credit: Charlie Hopkinson Try 10 issues of the Church Times for £10 or get two months access to our website and apps, also for £10. Go to churchtimes.co.uk/new-reader. Anglican ordinands studying in the UK, Ireland or the Diocese in Europe are eligible for a free Church Times subscription. Apply online at www.churchtimes.co.uk/ordinands