There is much talk of a revival of Christianity amongst secular intellectuals, at least in my cultural bubble. That may or may not be sociological significant and church attendence figures stay in marked decline. But what interests me is not so much the numbers as the spirit of the renewed interest. What is the feel of the Christianity being discussed, what attitudes does it embody, what spiritual does it represent? CS Lewis and Owen Barfield discussed these things and, then, Barfield teased out...
Apr 08, 2024•41 min
A couple of years back, Martin Shaw had a visionary experience that led him to Christianity. We talked about it as the Mossy face of Christ - https://youtu.be/8luN8bDDRBs?si=c7jHUt-Ih5xKlVWq So it was great to talk again about what's been happening. Which is much. The conversation ranges over what might be happening now with Christianity, Martin's recent participation in the Symbolic World Summit, the strangeness, weirdness and terror of Christ, being in the world but not of it, and the importan...
Mar 28, 2024•1 hr 14 min
The makers of Seaspiracy and Cowspiracy are back. Christspiracy is another profoundly disturbing film detailing the industrial abuse of our animal kin. Expect more horrific carelessness and exploitation on a mass scale. Only this time, Kip Andersen and Kameron Waters not only go global but look back in time. “This is plausibly the most significant new discovery about Jesus Christ, in the last 2,000 years,” says the blurb. But can that be right? Has justified outrage at the treatment of our fello...
Mar 12, 2024•1 hr 34 min
Energy is a key organising principle in modern science, the conversation of energy being a grounding and universal law. But what is energy? In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon examine the history of the idea and the word. In science, energy is a relatively recently notion, emerging in its current form in the 19th century, drawing much on mechanics. The word itself was coined by Aristotle, in the 4th century BCE, carrying a sense of vital actuality ...
Mar 01, 2024•37 min
I talk again with Landon Loftin and Max Leyf about the genius insight of Owen Barfield. The Riddle of the Sphinx (Barfield Press) is a new collection of talks and essays about the great friend of CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien. We discuss Barfield's take on analysis and analogy, Darwinian and other kinds of evolution, the significance of Rudolf Stein, and Barfield's notion of final participation. Landon and Max are the authors of What Barfield Thought. For more on my books, including A Secret History ...
Feb 26, 2024•1 hr 21 min
How can Christianity address the climate crisis? Isn’t the objectifying of nature and the drive to improve our lot a secular legacy of Christendom? And isn’t individual conversion more or less irrelevant in a time of systemic crisis? I was delighted to be sent an essay by Gunnar Gjermundsen that asks these questions and more. His insights are wide-ranging, integrating, inspiring and challenging, focusing on a Christianity that is not so much moral as transformative, inviting us to consider again...
Feb 22, 2024•1 hr 23 min
Western liturgies are obsessed with sin. "There is no health in us", or words to that effect, begin and end most services, particularly in Lent. Jesus's wilderness experience was actually about something else - practicing paradise, to use to the phrase of Douglas Christie. It's a time to reorientate attention, not wallow in guilt and re-embed shame. The kingdom is near. Eyes that see, ears that hear, can awaken.
Feb 15, 2024•8 min
Isaac Newton is best known for his theory of gravity. And yet, the great scientist also insisted: "ye cause of gravity is what I do not pretend to know.” In other words, notions like gravity, and force in general, are deeply mysterious phenomena. In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon ask just what gravity might be. The conversation begins with a feature of gravity that is typically overlooked by physicists, namely that gravity has a speed which is fa...
Jan 26, 2024•32 min
The rituals around death and dying are changing in the UK and across the developed world. Medical care advances, which is for the good, though can mean to a loss of other kinds of wisdom about this facet of life. People’s beliefs and convictions about death are also in a state of flux. The think tank, Theos, has extensively researched this changing landscape, so I was very glad to speak with Madeleine Pennington from Theos about their discoveries, particularly from the perspective of design. Thi...
Jan 25, 2024•42 min
A conversation with actor, Jamie Robson, whom I met through the work of Rupert Spira. 00:00 Meeting through Rupert Spira 03:26 Nondualism and Christian mysticism 06:02 Nondualism and acting 15:00 Being and doing 19:40 Detachment and Meister Eckhart 26:48 Two modes of perception in Iain McGilchrist and others 32:43 Double vision and a re-enchanted world 37:30 UFOs and levitation as cases 49:45 Everyday re-enchantment 52:07 British Weird Wave film 59:33 Cultural shifts?...
Jan 22, 2024•1 hr 4 min
Born in Nigeria and raised in the UK since the age of 4, Chine McDonald is well placed to explore love in different cultural contexts, and what happens when differences meet. We talked about how differences show up particularly in relation to the practicalities of loving, from house design to how people talk at funerals, as well as wider questions such as images of God and the critiquing and idealising of different traditions. Our conversation is one of many I'm conducting as part of a project l...
Jan 18, 2024•23 min
Environmental degradation caused by technological progress is in the news almost everyday. So can any sense be made of an ancient intuition that human beings are not just part of nature but have a distinctive and positive role to play in nature? In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon discuss issues from the significance of consciousness to cosmic emergence in order to explore a vision of humanity in nature that goes well beyond our life being the mean...
Dec 20, 2023•36 min
Christmas risks losing its meaning not only because of the commercial frenzy but because of the way it is talked about in churches. In this conversation, Russell Jefford talks about his discovery of the understanding of the incarnation conveyed in the writings of the early church fathers. They were unknown to him as an evangelical Christian and have refreshed his love of Christianity now. Together with Mark Vernon, they consider the iconography of the nativity. Why is Jesus born in a cave? Is th...
Dec 19, 2023•57 min
“A worldview that understands indigeneity is a paradigm of regeneration, a worldview rooted in enduring values in what we call our original instructions, common themes of reciprocity, of gratitude, of responsibility, of generosity, of forgiveness, of humility, of courage, of sacrifice, and of course love. But these values are not just words, we need to live them.” Melissa Nelson In this conversation with Melissa, we explore various facets of what she summarises in the quote above. The original i...
Dec 09, 2023•43 min
Clare Martin is co-director of the St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace, located in the heart of the City of London. In this conversation, we spoke about what love can look like in the public square, particularly in contexts of crisis and conflict, and how encounters between peoples can be designed so as to foster love as a resource and active dynamic. The conversation ranged over the importance of stories, histories and the design of places, so as to aid people being more vulnera...
Dec 01, 2023•50 min
VALA can be downloaded as a pdf here - https://blakesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/VALA-04.pdf My essay is at p60 For more on Mark - www.markvernon.com
Nov 29, 2023•9 min
What is the role of love in public life? Can it have a place given the scrutiny faced by leaders and the processes of bureaucracies? Or is love what we need to face the huge challenges of today, from distrust of public institutions to the environmental crisis? Claire Gilbert is the author of several books, a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, has served on several public and advisory bodies, and is the Director of the Westminster Abbey Institute. In this conversation, we talk about soulfulness ...
Nov 23, 2023•42 min
Constellations, also called family systems, is a way of visualising the dynamics of love that operate in any group that has to do with creativity or life. A constellation workshop brings people together to look at predicaments with which people are wrestling, be they personal or organisational. The goal is to find a design that releases and acknowledges the love that yearns to find a way forward, though can be thwarted or become stuck. In this conversation, Robert Rowland Smith and Mark Vernon, ...
Nov 21, 2023•40 min
Do our minds reside solely inside our heads, or perhaps bodies? Or do they extend into the wider world, perhaps even reaching to the stars? In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon discuss the extended mind theory, taking a lead from recent work of Rupert’s on the sense of being stared at, and also the problems that contemporary science has with understanding vision. The discussion considers new research carried out by Rupert and others, as well as the ...
Nov 10, 2023•43 min
Robin Dunbar is an Oxford evolutionary psychologist who has written extensively about friendship, amongst other things, not least in relation to “Dunbar’s Number”. We talked about what friendship is, and how it differs from other loves. We explored the varieties of friendship that people experience, and why metaphors such as “circles of friends” are so significant. Numbers are illuminating when it comes to understanding the dynamics of friendship, not only Dunbar’s Number, but also other thresho...
Nov 10, 2023•1 hr 14 min
Bishop Barron is another figure I think worth listening to, who spoke at ARC in London, alongside Jordan Peterson. Like Peterson, he simultaneously leaves me as wary as enthused. I’ve explained where that took me with Peterson in another short talk. Here’s where I’ve ended up in response to Barron, which interesting is also, in my view, with a richer, fuller sense of Christianity untamed, unleashed. In short, you might say that Barron has his diagnosis right but his antidote wrong. And like Pete...
Nov 05, 2023•10 min
All in all, there is much to consider in Jordan Peterson’s latest passionate suggestions. I think he is right to present a vision of the human good coming from the future, thereby calling us and shaping a meaningful life now. The human self needs a sense of itself that exceeds an otherwise atomised, lonely individualism. However, in may view, Peterson celebrates faith and responsibility at the risk of losing love and response. In this talk, and in the spirit of dialogue, I try to show why the fu...
Nov 03, 2023•10 min
Thinking carefully, not just apocalyptically, about AIs requires a combination of skills - technological, sociological, psychological, philosophical, organisational. So I was delighted to talk with Eve Poole, who is a rare individual capable of bringing all these elements into her work. Our central question was how to build AIs so as to design out risk and design in love. It turns out that the two elements are deeply connected. We began by thinking about the nature of the threat and opportunity....
Nov 02, 2023•45 min
Churches are in decline, certainly in the western world. People tend not to think to turn to a priest for spiritual insight or advice. But is a lived relationship with the sacred and wisdom traditions denuded as organised religion disappears? In this Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogue, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon talk about religious institutions for good and ill. Rupert picks up on a new book by Alison Milbank, Once and Future Parish, to ask how churches can maintain connection with the seasons, pl...
Oct 21, 2023•38 min
At the beginning of Idler Drinks (see www.idler.co.uk), I offer a thought. Here's the one from this week.
Oct 18, 2023•6 min
Owen Barfield talked of an evolution of consciousness towards final participation. But what is that state or quality awareness? How does it relate to the life of Christ? How was it described by Rudolf Steiner? Can we see and know intimations of it now? In this second discussion with Landon Loftin and Max Leyf, we explore the ideas of freedom and individuality, modernity and language, kenosis and romanticism come of age to press Barfield’s great insight and see whether we can help give it voice. ...
Oct 07, 2023•1 hr 8 min
Why do we love? Is love inevitably a foolhardy endeavour? Or does it lead to a knowledge of reality beyond reason? In this discussion, Robert Rowland Smith and Mark Vernon discuss the ideas of Freud and Lacan, Bowlby and Winnicott, who had differing ideas about the nature of love and where it leads. Is love the idealisation of another, which inevitably leads to frustration and loss? Is love the realisation of a wider reality which, without it, we would neither feel drawn to or be prepared to kno...
Oct 07, 2023•37 min
What golden thread might link these writers across the centuries? Why might each matter now? Taking a lead from Valentin’s book, Shakespeare and the Grace of Words, we explore how the finite and infinite meet in dialogue, analogy, play and contrary, arguing that Plato, Nicholas of Cusa, Shakespeare and William Blake directly address our times of crisis and separation. For more on Valentin’s book see www.routledge.com/Shakespeare-and-the-Grace-of-Words-Language-Theology-Metaphysics/Gerlier/p/book...
Aug 20, 2023•1 hr 12 min
What is meant by the unconscious? Is it even a "thing"? Why does it seemingly originate with Freud? How useful is the concept? How can it be worked with? In this discussion, Robert Rowland Smith and Mark Vernon explore the history of this central notion in psychoanalysis. They look at the different articulations of it, particularly in Freud and Jung, and ask how it links to other ideas such as the field, inspiration and the divine. Are vertical metaphors the right metaphors, as when people talk ...
Aug 11, 2023•42 min
Prayer, alongside meditation, is an integral part of religious traditions. God can be prayed to but also saints and angels. In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert and Mark ask whether and why prayer is not widely discussed, how prayer can be practiced, and what prayer might be. They share personal practices of prayer and explore the agency of angels and saints. They ask about the entities that people report encountering when using psychedelics, alongside other questions such a...
Aug 01, 2023•38 min
