On this week’s podcast, Dr Andrew Rumsey talks about his new book, English Grounds: A pastoral journal (SCM Press). The book is available to buy from the Church Times Bookshop for the special price of £15.99, and extracts are published in this week’s Church Times (3 December).

“It’s a book about places, the way that we shape them and they shape us,” he says in a short video about the book. “It’s about memory and belonging and heritage, Christian heritage especially, and the way in which the Church has shaped the nation’s story for good and ill over many centuries, and my hope that the Christian narrative can yet help us to tell a more hopeful story about England’s future.”

At the end of the podcast, he reads an extract from the book and plays a song, “Silbury Hill,” which he wrote to accompany the launch of the book.

Dr Rumsey is the Bishop of Ramsbury in Salisbury diocese, and the co-lead bishop for church buildings and cathedrals.

His previous book is Parish: An Anglican theology of place (Features, 2 June 2017, Books, 21 July 2017).

Music for the podcast is by Twisterium. Picture credit: KT BRUCE

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