The Sacred

The Sacred

A podcast about the things we hold sacred, and how to talk to people different from ourselves.

#47 Will Gervais and Penny Edgell

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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.

#46 Rhik Samadder

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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.

#45 Douglas Alexander

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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.

#44 Tanya Muneera Williams

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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.

#43 Pádraig Ó Tuama

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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.

#42 Mim Skinner

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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.

#41 Hussein Kesvani

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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.

#39 Sanderson Jones

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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.

#38 Ash Sarkar

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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.

#37 Justin Welby

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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.

About this podcast

The Sacred is a podcast about our deepest values, the stories that shape us and how we can build empathy and understanding between people who are very different.

Each episode features a conversation with someone who has a public voice, from academics to journalists, playwrights and politicians. We ask them where they have come from, what they are trying to do and what might help heal our very divided public conversations.

The Sacred is hosted by Elizabeth Oldfield, former director of Theos think tank.

For more information about the people and ideas behind the podcast, visit https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/about/who-we-are or follow us on Twitter @theosthinktank, @sacred_podcast and @ESOldfield.

by Theos think tank

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