The Church Times Podcast

Dave Walker is known and loved by Church Times readers for his weekly cartoons on church life. At Greenbelt last month, Dave spoke to the Australian cartoonist Michael Leunig — whose work appears regularly in the Melbourne Age and the Sydney Morning Herald — about the art, craft, and pain of cartooning. “A cartoonist is pushing boundaries or trying to assert freedom of speech,” Leunig says. “‘A cartoon in good taste is a contradiction in terms’, an editor once said to me. It’s the cartoonist who's allowed to be the holy fool or the court jester. You’re allowed to get away with things, and it’s a privileged position.” Listen to the fascinating conversation on this week’s edition of the Church Times Podcast. Dave Walker’s seventh collection of Church Times cartoons, Revenge of the Flowers Arrangers, will be published at the end of the month by Canterbury Press. cartoonchurch.com

The second Festival of Preaching took place at Christ Church, Oxford this week, organised by the Church Times and Canterbury Press. Keynote talks by Paula Gooder and Mark Oakley can be viewed on our Facebook page here and here. Other talks will be available to purchase as audio files - keep an eye on festivalofpreaching.hymnsam.co.uk for an announcement, or the Festival’s Twitter account (@FofPreaching). And on this week’s Church Times Podcast, we bring you one of the talks from the Festival, by the American author and activist Brian McLaren: “Worship that destroys (and saves) the world”. If you don't yet subscribe to the Church Times, check out our new reader offer: 10 issues for £10: www.churchtimes.co.uk/new-reader

The Festival of Preaching takes place at Christ Church, Oxford from Sunday 8 Sept to Tuesday 10 Sept. The Festival, organised by Church Times and Canterbury Press, aims to inspire, nurture and celebrate all who are called to proclaim the gospel today. Speakers include Brian McLaren, David Hoyle, Paula Gooder, and Mark Oakley. The Festival is sold out, but if you didn’t get a ticket, you can watch Paula Gooder and Mark Oakley’s talks live on the Church Times Facebook page, and videos of some of the other talks will be available afterwards on the Church Times YouTube channel. We also plan to feature a recording of one of the talks on the Church Times Podcast. The Revd Ally Barrett, a priest and tutor at Westcott House, Cambridge, will be leading a seminar on all-age preaching. Her book Preaching with All Ages, is published by Canterbury Press and is available from the Church Times Bookshop for the special price of £13.50. Ed Thornton spoke to Ally Barrett ahead of the Festival.

A new book by Dr Mark Vernon, a psychotherapist and former parish priest, suggests that “something is going wrong with Christianity”. A Secret History of Christianity: Jesus, the Last Inkling, and the evolution of consciousness argues that “standard mystical theology” — the idea “that your life springs from God’s life and that this truth is yours to be discovered” — has been lost in the past 500 years. The following is a conversation between Dr Vernon and Jules Evans, policy director at the Centre for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary University University of London and the author of The Art of Losing Control: A philosopher’s search for ecstatic experience. A Secret History of Christianity is published by Christian Alternative at £14.99 (CT Bookshop £13.50). The Art of Losing Control: A philosopher’s search for ecstatic experience is published by Canongate at £9.99 (CT Bookshop £9). If you don't yet subscribe to the Church Times, check out our new reader offer: 10 issues for £10: www.churchtimes.co.uk/new-reader

The podcast continues its summer break this week, so we are giving you the chance to listen again (or perhaps for the first time) to an interview from our archives. This interview with Professor John Swinton was first run in 2017. Professor Swinton is the winner of the 2016 Michael Ramsey Prize. The winner of the 2019 Michael Ramsey Prize will be announced this weekend at the Greenbelt Festival. The podcast will return with a new episode on 30 August.

The podcast continues its summer break this week, so we are giving you the chance to listen again (or perhaps for the first time) to an interview from our archives. This episode was originally posted in July 2018. Guy Stagg spent 10 months walking from Canterbury to Jerusalem, following medieval pilgrim paths across 5,500 km. He began the journey after several years of mental illness, hoping that the walk would heal him. A non-believer, he wanted to understand religion by taking part in its rituals. The Crossway, published by Picador, is an account of his journey, a mix of travel and memoir, history and current affairs. It is now out in paperback, and is available from the Church House Bookshop. Guy came into Church Times offices to talk about his extraordinary journey. Picture: copyright Barney Poole Photography

The podcast is taking a summer break this week. But we're giving you the chance to listen again (or for the first time, if you missed it the first time round) to the Revd Fergus Butler-Gallie in conversation with Tom Holland, about Fergus's book A Field Guide to the English Clergy (Oneworld). It was recorded at Hatchards bookshop, in central London, in November 2018. Fergus is a guest columnist in this week's Church Times. His next book, Priests de la Résistance!, will be published in October by Oneworld. Tom Holland's next book, Dominion: The making of the Western Mind, will be published next month by Little Brown.

At Launde Abbey last month, Dame Hilary Mantel and Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch reflected on the life of Thomas Cromwell and his place in the Reformation. They were speaking at an event to mark the 900th anniversary of Launde Abbey, which Cromwell was fond of visiting. In part two, we hear the conversation between them, introduced and moderated by the Bishop of Brixworth, the Rt Revd John Holbrook

At Launde Abbey last month, Dame Hilary Mantel and Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch reflected on the life of Thomas Cromwell and his place in the Reformation. They were speaking at an event to mark the 900th anniversary of Launde Abbey, which Cromwell was fond of visiting. Both hardly need introducing. Mantel is, of course, the author of Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, published by Fourth Estate, each of which were awarded the Booker Prize. The final book in the trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, is due to be published next March. Professor MacCulloch’s Thomas Cromwell: A life, was published last year by Allen Lane, to critical acclaim. In this week’s Church Times, we publish an edited record of their fascinating discussion. And on the podcast we bring you even more of the event. In this episode, part 1, we hear presentations from each of them about how, as a novelist and historian respectively, they have approached the Putney boy who became Henry VIII’s chief minister. The event was introduced and moderated by the Bishop of Brixworth, the Rt Revd John Holbrook.

Last month, Oxford University was given £150m by a US billionaire, Stephen A. Schwarzman, to study the ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence. In the announcement, he warned that technology left unaffected would “trample over certain aspects of human behaviour and human opportunities”, before setting out the potential to “reaffirm western values” and “help the world adjust to changing times.” Which raises the question: whose values exactly would we be reaffirming? We commissioned this week’s Artificial Intelligence special to explore this question, and others surrounding ethics and AI. In particular, we asked four writers to reflect on what the Bishop of Oxford has suggested is the deep question of our age: “What does it mean to be a human?” We also feature an extract from a new book by Tom Chivers, who spent months with some of those who have long worried about the existential threat posed by AI. In this podcast, Madeleine Davies talks to him about how worried we should be. Tom’s book, The AI Does Not Hate You: Superintelligence, rationality and the race to save the world, is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson at £16.99 (CT Bookshop £15.30).