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 ...
Nov 13, 2020•11 min
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...
Nov 05, 2020•23 min
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 disa...
Oct 30, 2020•16 min
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 cal...
Oct 19, 2020•1 hr 45 min
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 abo...
Oct 15, 2020•29 min
This week’s podcast features a talk by the Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, the Very Revd Professor Martyn Percy, given at the Church Times Festival of Preaching, which took place virtually last week. His talk is titled “The Verb of God made flesh — Jesus, love, and learning in a post-Covid Church.” “Instead of constantly trying to present a Church triumphant, what about a Church that is receptive, learning, and humble? Not a Church anymore of monologue, but a Church of dialogue. Instead of a Chur...
Oct 08, 2020•25 min
On this week’s podcast, Ed Thornton talks to the theologian and poet Bishop Graham Kings about his recently released collection of poems, Nourishing Connections (Canterbury Press). They are joined by Silvia Dimitrova, who has worked with Bishop Graham on his Nourishing Connections project (www.grahamkings.org) over the past 17 years and produced seven accompanying paintings of Women in the Bible, and Tristan Latchford, who is composing seven anthems on the paintings and poems. “When you have the...
Oct 01, 2020•21 min
On the podcast this week, the Revd A. D. A France-Williams reads from his book Ghost Ship: Institutional racism and the Church of England (SCM Press). “To love oneself as a black person in the UK is an act of resistance to the pressures and powers that are actively bearing down to disassemble whatever sense of identity one can muster.” Ghost Ship was reviewed in the Church Times by the Revd Arlington W. Trotman, who called it “unbelievably courageous and timely”. Read an interview with A. D. A. ...
Sep 25, 2020•33 min
On this week’s podcast, Ed Thornton talks to author and Church Times columnist Paul Vallely about his new book, Philanthropy: From Aristotle to Zuckerberg (Bloomsbury). The book was reviewed in last week’s Church Times by Alan Billings, who writes: “‘Philanthropy’”, as used by Paul Vallely, is elastic enough to range from the widow’s mite to Bill Gates’s billions, from a religious duty to a voluntary offering, from one-to-one almsgiving to the charitable foundation, with mixed motives at every p...
Sep 17, 2020•31 min
On the podcast this week, rapper and playwright Testament interviews Leroy Logan, former superintendent in the Metropolitan police and co-founder of the National Black Police Association. They discuss Logan’s forthcoming book, Closing Ranks: My Life as a Cop – including his early experiences as a black police officer and his founding of the NBPA — as well as his faith, family, and what he hopes the Black Lives Matter movement will achieve. “I knew I was going into certain corridors of power and ...
Sep 11, 2020•1 hr
On this week’s podcast, Ed Thornton talks to Joe Walsh, founder of Faith in Operation, an initiative which invites Christians to consider giving a kidney to a stranger. They discuss the prospect of this “altruistic kidney donation” ending the transplantation waiting list, as well as Joe’s own experience of kidney donation and the effect of the coronavirus on those awaiting transplants. “After giving my kidney, I started to wonder why there was never any concerted Christian effort to promote altr...
Sep 04, 2020•14 min
On this week’s podcast, Ed Thornton talks to journalist, broadcaster, and campaigner Andrew Graystone about his new book, Faith, Hope and Mischief: Tiny acts of rebellion by an everyday activist (Canterbury Press). Andrew is the person who, after the mass shooting in a mosque in Christchurch, stood outside his local mosque in Manchester with a cardboard sign saying, “You are my friends. I'll watch while you pray.” A steadfast believer in the power of tiny acts to change the world, his book descr...
Aug 28, 2020•27 min
The Mirror and the Light, the conclusion to Dame Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, was published in March, and has since been nominated for both the Booker Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. It was reviewed by Alec Ryrie in the Church Times here. On this week’s podcast — taken from our archive — Dame Hilary and Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch reflect on the life of Thomas Cromwell and his place in the Reformation. They were speaking in July 2019 at an event to mark the 900th anniversary of ...
Aug 20, 2020•37 min
This week, we’ve visited the archive for an interview between Andrew Brown and bestselling historian Tom Holland, whose book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind is now out in paperback. “This isn’t a history of Christianity,” Holland says. “It’s a history of what’s been revolutionary and transformative about Christianity: about how Christianity has transformed not just the West, but the entire world. “People in the West, even those who may imagine that they have emancipated themselves from ...
Aug 13, 2020•59 min
On the podcast this week, Vicky Walker talks to author and theologian Tara Isabella Burton about her new book, Strange Rites: New religions for a godless world. They discuss the breakdown of public trust in major religious (and other) institutions, the subsequent rise of wellness culture in the US and beyond, and the part that technology plays in the formation of identity, community, and spiritual beliefs. “What we’re seeing is not a kind of secularisation of America between the religious and th...
Aug 06, 2020•44 min
This week’s podcast guest is Karen Gibson, the founder and director of the Kingdom Choir. She wrote for the Church Times last week about how her mother, a member of the Windrush generation, was asked not to return to a C of E church 50 years ago, but recently received an impassioned apology from its new vicar. Karen talks to Ed Thornton about her mother’s reaction to the apology and the conversations that still need to happen within the Church to combat racism, as well as how the members of her ...
Jul 31, 2020•15 min
This week, we bring a talk given by Malcolm Guite at the sixth Church Times Festival of Faith and Literature, in Oxfordshire, in February. Drawing on some of his own sonnets from his collection, Parable and Paradox (Canterbury Press, 2016), and on the work of Donne and Herbert, Malcolm explores the two great commandments, and, more widely, the call and response of love in the Christian life. His most recent poetry collection is After Prayer (Canterbury Press). Watch Malcolm’s other talk at the f...
Jul 24, 2020•58 min
On this week’s podcast, Ed Thornton talks to Ysenda Maxtone Graham about her new book, British Summer Time Begins: The school summer holidays 1930-1980 (Little, Brown) (Church Times Bookshop £17.10). Ysenda has written a piece on holidays and churchgoing for this week’s Church Times. They discuss Christian house-swaps and clergy holidays, as well as how much the school summer holiday experience has changed. “A typical day out meant going somewhere in the fresh air that didn’t charge for entry. ....
Jul 17, 2020•20 min
The Coronavirus, Church & You survey was set up to assess experiences of and responses to the Covid-19 pandemic among churchgoers in the UK. In this week’s podcast, Church Times editor Paul Handley discusses the results of the survey with its creators, the Revd Andrew Village, Professor of Practical and Empirical Theology, and Canon Leslie J. Francis, Visiting Professor of Theology and Religious Studies, both at York St John University. They consider levels of stress and spiritual well-being...
Jul 10, 2020•19 min
On the podcast this week, Canon Jessica Martin reads an extract from her much-anticipated new book, Holiness and Desire: What makes us who we are? The extract is published in this week’s Church Times (3 July). “Trusting the scriptures is not wilful blindness, but a speaking act of love. Because of love, I believe that the power of a medieval anonymous lyric to move me to tears signals an authentic rather than an historically naïf response. Because of love, I believe that a paradisal early memory...
Jul 03, 2020•11 min
The final of Theology Slam 2020, a competition to find engaging young voices who think theologically about the contemporary world, took place online on Tuesday 23 June. On this week’s podcast, you can hear the talks of the three finalists, who spoke on Theology and Disability, Theology and #MeToo, and Theology and Race. “‘Where are you?’ is the cry of the human spirit to God. It’s written on the placards of protestors; it’s whispered by the survivor of sexual abuse.” The winner was Augustine Tan...
Jun 26, 2020•26 min
This week’s podcast guest is Chine McDonald, a writer, broadcaster, and Head of Community Fundraising and Public Engagement at Christian Aid. Chine has written the Lift Up Your Hearts article for this week’s Church Times, and talks to Ed Thornton about how books, art, and music — as well as her faith — have sustained her during lockdown. “The Christ that I believe in is a Christ who . . . suffers with us, and part of the incarnation is the fact that God is right there with us in the horribleness...
Jun 19, 2020•19 min
On this week’s podcast, Ed Thornton talks to Augustine Tanner-Ihm about racism in the Church of England and beyond. “I really wanted to share God’s love, transform this society with the gospel of Jesus Christ, and do it in whatever context God calls me to.” Augustine, who recently completed his ordinand training at Cranmer Hall, Durham and has since been applying for curacies, received an email reply from one parish rejecting him “firstly” on the grounds that “the demographic of the parish is mo...
Jun 11, 2020•22 min
“All that we’ve ever done is about getting young people out of their rooms and into the community and working alongside us, and through lockdown we’ve been doing the opposite of that. . . So that has been very difficult.” On this week’s podcast, Ed Thornton talks to Gareth Sorsby, joint CEO of YMCA Exeter, about the impact of the coronavirus on an organisation whose work is grounded in face-to-face social contact and community integration. Eighty-seven per cent of young people at YMCA Exeter hav...
Jun 04, 2020•16 min
On the podcast this week, Church Times columnists Paul Vallely and Angela Tilby discuss the big story of the week: Dominic Cummings’s trip from London to County Durham during the lockdown. They talk about (and disagree on) whether the public outrage has been fair, and consider the reactions of the bishops. Writing in this week’s Church Times, Paul Vallely says: “Mr Cummings, with his legal loopholes and rule-rewriting, desecrated the dignity of ordinary people’s sacrifices. That’s what he appear...
May 28, 2020•27 min
This week, Ed Thornton talks to Madeleine Davies about her new book, Lights for the Path: A guide through grief, pain and loss, published today (21 May) by SPCK. It’s available to order from the Church Times Bookshop for the special price £8, and an extract is published in this week’s Church Times. “Lights for the Path is part memoir and part theological reflection on the theme of death,” the Head of Theology at Youthscape, Dr Phoebe Hill, says. “Skilfully woven together and littered with litera...
May 21, 2020•28 min
This week, Ed Thornton talks to the Rt Revd David Wilbourne about his biography of John Habgood, a former Archbishop of York, who died last year, aged 91. The book is called Just John: The authorized biography of John Habgood, Archbishop of York, 1983-1995 (SPCK), and is available from the Church Times Bookshop for the special price of £16. In an obituary published in the Church Times, Rupert Shortt describes Habgood as “the outstanding British Anglican leader of his generation, and perhaps the ...
May 15, 2020•41 min
On the podcast this week, Ed Thornton talks to the Revd Steve Morris about the important part played by Forces chaplains in the Second World War, and today. They include Captain Leslie Skinner, who Mr Morris writes about in this week’s Church Times, which marks the 75th anniversary of VE Day. “Skinner spent his time conducting funerals, digging graves, and praying with the dying and wounded,” he writes. “At one point, he went alone into a “cooked” tank full of burned human remains so that the me...
May 07, 2020•15 min
On this week’s podcast, Emma Major, a licensed lay pioneer minister at St Nicolas’s, Earley, in Oxford diocese, offers advice on how the Church can better include disabled people. She reads from an article that she wrote, which is published on our website: Isolation and the Church: online and offline. She says: “Of course, in a few weeks’ time, the first phase of lockdown may be eased and most church buildings open up again. I wonder what will happen, if so. Will online church provisions stop? H...
May 01, 2020•10 min
This week, Hannah Bacon talks about the research behind her book Feminist Theology and Contemporary Dieting Culture: Sin, salvation and women’s weight loss narratives (Bloomsbury). In a review of the book published in the Church Times, Jennie Hogan writes: “Susie Orbach’s 1978 seminal book Fat is a Feminist Issue broke taboos about women’s fleshy bodies. In Hannah Bacon’s engaging analysis of notions of fat in relation to Christianity, she argues forcefully and gracefully that fat is also a theo...
Apr 24, 2020•59 min
