The Sacred

This week’s episode features a speech from our Annual Lecture given by actor Sally Phillips. You may recognise her name from Smack the Pony, Veep, Clare in the Community, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Green Wing, and more. Motivated by her experiences raising a son with Down syndrome, Sally fronted a BBC2 documentary called ‘A World Without Down Syndrome,’ exploring the ethics of pregnancy screening for Down syndrome—and its availability on the NHS. She explores some of these same themes in the lecture.

This week, instead of a normal episode, we will be releasing the recording from tonight’s Theos Annual Lecture with Sally Phillips - actress, comedian, campaigner and former Sacred guest. We hope to share the recording with you in the next few days. In the meantime, enjoy Elizabeth reading this short poem by Wendell Berry.

Dr Gabriele Finaldi has been director of the National Gallery since August 2015. He was previously Deputy Director for Collections and Research at the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, and prior to that a curator at the National Gallery with a focus on Spanish and Italian paintings. In this episode he talks about his Catholic faith, how to navigate an increasingly visual world, and growing up in South London in an Italian community.

Note: we had some microphone issues with this episode, but we hope you'll listen as we deeply enjoyed the interview. Linda is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University. This year she has been in California at a fellowship at Stanford. From 2007-2012 she was Director of a 12 million pound research programme looking at religion and belief which culminated in the Westminster faith debates. In this episode she reflects on her sacred value of being real, her difficult relationship with the Church of England and her decision to walk away from it, and why it’s so difficult to talk about God in public.

Miroslav Volf is one of our best known contemporary theologians. He is Director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture and Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity school. He grew up amidst ethnic tensions in Communist Yugoslavia, and lived through the civil war which pit historically Catholic Croats, Eastern Orthodox Serbs and Bosnian Muslims against each other. Much of his work as a scholar and activist has been trying to make sense of these experiences, including his books ‘Exclusion and embrace’, ‘About reconciliation’, and ‘Allah: A Christian response.’ In this episode he talks about his sacred values of non-violence and freedom to self-determine, what it really takes to love people we perceive as enemies, and what civil war and contemporary British public debates might have in common.

Sarah Stein Lubrano is a DPhil researcher in the Department of Politics in Oxford and the Head of Content at The School of Life. The School of Life, founded by philosopher Alain de Botton, describes itself as a global organisation helping people lead more fulfilled lives. Sarah helped build their 4.5 million subscriber YouTube channel and designs and delivers a range of courses on emotional intelligence related subjects. In this episode she talks about atheism and Judaism, her sacred value of learning through love, how cognitive dissonance drives division in our public debates. Elizabeth and Sarah also discuss their unconventional sexual choices (waiting to have sex until marriage and polyamory respectively) and how difficult they are to talk about well in public.

Tom Holland is a historian, biographer and broadcaster. He is the author of Rubicon, Persian Fire, Millennium and In the Shadow of the Sword among many others. He has just published Dominion, which tells the story of the influence of Christianity on the Western world. In this episode he talks about losing his childhood faith, falling in love with the classical world, and why he’d really like to believe in God.

This episode was recorded at The Cultures of Unbelief Conference at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome in May 2019. The conference marked the end of the major Understanding Unbelief research programme run by the University of Kent and partners over three years involving 22 projects globally. The conference also marked fifty years since another conference convened by the Vatican, called The Culture of Unbelief which was the first academic conference on atheism. The guests are Will Gervais and Penny Edgell. Will Gervais is an evolutionary and cultural psychologist, who is interested in why people believe what they believe about the world, and what this means for them psychologically. Penny Edgell is a cultural sociologist with an interest in the growth of the non-religious in America.

In this episode, you'll hear a conversation with Rhik Samadder, who's a journalist, actor, presenter, and author. He rose to public prominence writing 'Inspect a gadget,' the weekly kitchen-gadget column with a cult following in the Guardian, and now writes weekly about wellness trends. He's also the author of 'I Never Said I Loved You,' a memoir about depression published in August 2019. You'll hear Rhik discuss the impact of childhood racism, taking a non-traditional path into journalism, and the pain and privilege of writing about mental health.

Douglas Alexander served as an MP for 18 years and spent 9 years in government under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, holding a range of cabinet positions and serving as UK Governor to the World Bank. He’s now a Senior Fellow at Harvard University and Chair of Trustees at Unicef. In this episode, he talks about his Church of Scotland faith, joining the Labour party in his early teens, why he doesn’t miss the House of Commons chamber and what economics could do to help with our politics of anger.