Sameer is Managing Editor for Arts and Books at Prospect Magazine, and has been a judge for the Costa Poetry Book Prize, the Forward Prize for Poetry and the Orwell Prize for non-fiction. He is also the author of Asghar and Zahra, a novel about a young couple born into the same British Muslim community and their first year of marriage. He speaks about his religious childhood, loving his time studying English literature at Cambridge, his evolving Muslim faith and why the true history of our relig...
Jan 29, 2020•46 min
In this episode you’ll hear our very first episode with a married couple, Richard and Lydia Ayoade (Lydia is also known as Lydia Fox). Richard will be familiar to many of you as an actor, director, writer and comedian, known for his role in The IT Crowd, directing films ‘Submarine’ and ‘The Double’, presenting Gadget Man, Travel Man and The Crystal Maze as well as numerous comedy panel shows. Richard is married to Lydia who has worked as an actress, and is the daughter of actor James Fox and has...
Jan 15, 2020•34 min
Daniel is Baron Finkelstein, a Member of the House of Lords, and has a column in The Times newspaper. He is a former executive editor of The Times and advisor to John Major and William Hague. In this episode he speaks about the impact of the holocaust on his Jewish family, what drew him to politics and how he thinks about the moral responsibility of the political decisions in public life.
Jan 01, 2020•46 min
Welcome to a special second birthday episode! This week we have turned the tables and former guest, Ian Dunt, has come in to interview host Elizabeth Oldfield. After putting her guests through their paces for the last two years, Elizabeth takes her turn at answering some of the big questions sharing some of her own story. In this episode she talks about her sacred value of relationships, working for the BBC and her reflections from 2 years on The Sacred. We are really grateful to Ian Dunt, whose...
Dec 11, 2019•44 min
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...
Nov 29, 2019•41 min
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.
Nov 27, 2019•3 min
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.
Nov 13, 2019•43 min
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 o...
Oct 29, 2019•35 min
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 embr...
Oct 16, 2019•49 min
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 le...
Oct 01, 2019•49 min
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.
Sep 17, 2019•46 min
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 Gervai...
Sep 04, 2019•50 min
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 ...
Aug 20, 2019•44 min
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.
Aug 06, 2019•40 min
Tanya Muneera Williams is one half of hip-hop, reggae and spoken work duo, Poetic Pilgrimage. She is an artist, a poet and an activist and regularly appears on BBC Radio 2 to deliver ‘Pause For Thought’. Tanya is of Jamaican heritage and converted to Islam in 2005. In this episode, Tanya talks about her sacred value of allowing alternative stories to be told, her experience moving from Christianity to a spiritual form of Islam and why she still hasn’t found her space within feminism.
Jul 23, 2019•23 min
Pádraig Ó Tuama is a poet, theologian and peace maker. Until recently he was the leader of the Corrymeela community, which is Ireland’s oldest peace and reconciliation organisation. They describe themselves as 'people who seek to engage with the differences of our world... people who disagree with each other on matters of religion, politics and economics and people who wish to name our own complicity in the fractures that damage our societies.' In this episode he spoke about his sacred values of...
Jul 09, 2019•39 min
Mim Skinner is the author of ‘Jailbirds’ which contains stories of her time teaching art in a women’s prison. She currently runs the women’s project for the charity Handcrafted, supporting women to connect to community, housing and recovery through creativity. She is also co-founder of Refuse which works to intercept food which would otherwise go to landfill and do some good with it. In this episode, Mim talks about what she learned from working with female prisoners, the positive influence of l...
Jun 25, 2019•45 min
Hussein Kesvani is a journalist, editor and producer based in London. He is the Europe editor of MEL Magazine, has written for BuzzFeed, Vice, The Guardian, the New Statesman and The Spectator, and is the author of 'Follow Me, Akhi: The Online World of British Muslims,' available from Hurst Publishers. That book is now available for purchase here: https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/follow-me-akhi/ In this episode, he discusses his childhood as one of the only Muslim children in his school in K...
Jun 11, 2019•50 min
Sanderson Jones is a comedian, a social entrepreneur and the co-founder of Sunday Assembly, a worldwide movement of secular congregations. In this episode, he talks about his early experiences of religion, the impact of losing his mum as a child, his sacred value of life and why he feels we all need more meaning and belonging.
May 14, 2019•39 min
Ash Sarkar is a writer, broadcaster, journalist and lecturer. She is a Senior Editor at Novara Media, an independent left-wing media organisation, and regularly appears as a pundit on television and radio. In this episode she discusses her sacred value of human life, being a ‘red diaper baby’, rediscovering Islam and her worries that adversarial debates are shaping us in unhealthy ways.
Apr 30, 2019•35 min
Justin Welby has been the Archbishop of Canterbury since 2013. Prior to this, he served as Bishop of Durham and Dean of Liverpool Cathedral. He spent the first 15 years of his ordained life in Coventry diocese. He was ordained in 1992 after an 11-year career in the oil industry. In this podcast, he talks about the difficulties of leading the global Anglican Communion, how he was dragged reluctantly into ordained ministry and his need to occasionally switch off and watch an Avengers film.
Apr 16, 2019•41 min
Matthew Taylor is the Chief Executive of the RSA, author of the 2016 Taylor Report review of modern employment commissioned by Theresa May, and panellist on the BBC Radio 4 programme The Moral Maze. He was formally head of the Number 10 Policy Unit under Tony Blair, Director of IPPR, Assistant General Secretary of the Labour Party and a county councillor. This episode covers his sacred values of human rights, his childhood loneliness, why he’s really uncomfortable with conflict and why as an ath...
Apr 09, 2019•43 min
Rev Sally Hitchener is an Anglican priest and Associate Vicar of St-Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square. She was previously co-ordinating Anglican Chaplain and inter-faith advisor at Brunel University, and is the founder of Diverse Church, a charity which supports LGBT+ Christians. In this episode she discusses her sacred value of gift, her experiences as a gay female priest, and why sometimes being an outsider can be a blessing.
Mar 27, 2019•43 min
David Allen Green is a lawyer and legal commentator. He is a contributing editor at the Financial Times and a former legal correspondent for the New Statesman. He led the defence at the Twitter Joke Trial in 2012 and is now known for his commentary on the legal complexities surrounding Brexit. This interview explores why he became a lawyer instead of a historian, the responsibility that comes with a massive Twitter following and how he tries not to upset religious friends.
Mar 13, 2019•41 min
Christina Patterson is a writer and broadcaster. A former chief executive of the Poetry Society and columnist for The Independent, she now writes for The Guardian, The Sunday Times and The Daily Mail about culture, society, politics and books. She is a regular commentator on radio and TV news programmes and a regular guest on Sky News. She is the author of The Art of Not Falling Apart which you can buy here https://www.amazon.co.uk/Art-Not-Falling-Apart/dp/1786492768/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encodi...
Feb 27, 2019•44 min
James Cary is a comedy writer. He has written sitcoms for BBC TV and radio, including Miranda, Bluestone 42, Think the Unthinkable and Hut 33. He is the author of Writing That Sitcom, Death by Civilisation and most recently The Sacred Art of Joking. He is also a member of General Synod. We spoke about how he doesn't feel fully at home in either his church tribe or his comedy tribe, why he doesn't mind that his socially conservative views offend some people, and the importance of defending the fr...
Feb 13, 2019•42 min
Shadi Hamid is a political scientist and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, in their Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World in the Center for Middle East Policy. Hes also a contributing editor for The Atlantic. He's the author most recently of Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam is Reshaping the World (https://www.amazon.com/Islamic-Exceptionalism-Struggle-Islam-Reshaping/dp/1250135133/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1447698723&sr=1-1), and the co-edito...
Jan 30, 2019•44 min
Ariane Sherine is a comedy writer, journalist and in 2009 was creator of the Atheist Bus Campaign. She was written comedy for the BBC, Channel 4 and beyond, journalism for The Spectator, The Guardian, Telegraph and Sunday Times, and is the author of The Atheists Guide to Christmas and Talk Yourself Better: a Confused Person’s guide to Therapy, Self-help and Counselling. We spoke about a traumatic abortion experience, her struggles with mental health, what has changed since the bus campaign 10 ye...
Jan 16, 2019•35 min
Nick Payne is an award winning playwright and screenwriter. His plays 'Constellations', and 'If There is I Haven’t Found it Yet' have been performed in London and New York and his series 'Wanderlust' was recently screened on BBC 1 and Netflix. Nick adapted Julian Barnes's The Sense Of An Ending for BBC Films which was released in 2017 with Jim Broadbent.Jake Gyllenhaal will star in Nick's play A Life which will run at The Public Theater on Broadway from January to March 2019. In this episode he ...
Jan 02, 2019•47 min
There is no full episode of The Sacred as we are taking a break over Christmas. Instead, here's a short message from Elizabeth about dealing with difference in our very own homes and some announcements about next year's exciting line-up.
Dec 26, 2018•2 min
