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.

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.

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 language and encounter, why poetry can help us build our understanding, what keeps him coming back to the story of faith, and how much he loves it when people do unexpected things in situations of conflict.

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 living in the North East having grown up in the home counties, and why feminism sometimes struggles to accommodate the most vulnerable women.

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 Kent, his parents' hidden histories and their expulsion from Uganda in the 1970s, his trajectory from Islam to atheism and back again, and why his online presence is a bit surreal.