Holy Smoke

By The SpectatorSociety & Culture Religion & Spirituality Christianity Philosophy Religion

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Typical duration
22 min
per episode

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Holy Smoke episodes

March 09, 2020 Has the Vatican become a mouthpiece for Beijing?
With Ed Condon, Washington bureau chief of the Catholic News Agency.

Presented by Damian Thompson.
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20 min
February 28, 2020 Why the collapse of Christian Science should worry mainstream churches
In this week’s Holy Smoke podcast, Damian talks to Jon Anderson, an expert on religious and political sects, about the collapse of Christian Science – whose followers included Joyce Grenfell and Doris Day – and the scary lessons it holds for today’s mainstream religions.

Presented by Damian Thompson.
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17 min
February 20, 2020 Why the Pope said no to married priests
The dust has still not settled after Pope Francis unexpectedly – and very pointedly – ignored pleas from liberal Catholics to ordain married men as priests. They had a fully worked-out plan in place, but the Pope had pressed the 'delete' button. So what happened?

With Vatican expert Dr Ed Condon, Washington bureau chief of the Catholic News Agency and a canon lawyer.

Presented by Damian Thompson.
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21 min
February 10, 2020 The strange journey of Europe’s ‘Christian’ Jews
With writer Norman Lebrecht, whose book Genius and Anxiety takes a look at the exceptional intellectual contribution of Jews from 1847 to 1947, to the worlds of medicine, music, philosophy, engineering and more.

Presented by Damian Thompson.
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31 min
January 10, 2020 Has the Church of England surrendered to ‘soft socialism’?
Just before Christmas, Dr Gavin Ashenden, a former Chaplain to the Queen, converted to Catholicism. In this episode, he deplores the Church of England’s surrender to secularism under Archbishop Justin Welby, who won’t enjoy his former colleague’s assessment of his talents...

Presented by Damian Thompson.
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23 min
December 23, 2019 Why it's a sin to sneer at 1970s Christmas specials
With Dr Tim Stanley, journalist and historian.

Presented by Damian Thompson.
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24 min
November 15, 2019 Does the Church know how to deal with mental illness?
We're all sick of celebrities making a meal of their mental health problems – but that doesn't mean that we aren't facing a potential crisis. The unique strains of living in the technology-driven 21st century are taking their toll on people who, in an earlier era, would have been psychologically robust. Many of us are affected by anxiety, depression, addiction and eating disorders; all sorts of compulsive behaviour are flourishing as never before.

And the mainstream churches have got nothing useful to say about it. Many bishops seem content to blame it on Brexit.

Damian Thompson talks to Professor Stephen Bullivant, Britain's foremost expert on patterns of religious belief. Both talk frankly – 'bravely', as they say of celebrities – about their struggles with mental illness.
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38 min
November 01, 2019 Eduardo Hiiboro Kussala: a different sort of bishop
On today's Holy Smoke Damian Thompson meets a one-of-a-kind bishop: one whose most important dialogue is with armed warlords and their teenage mercenaries. South Sudan's Bishop Eduardo Hiiboro Kussala runs a hospital that is desperately short of doctors and medicine amid a humanitarian crisis in which over 200,000 people have died. On the podcast, he talks about his work, and the apparent corruption of various NGOs who have set up shop in this terribly troubled part of Africa.
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17 min
October 11, 2019 Why the Vatican is more corrupt than ever
Last week, Vatican police raided the Church's own money-laundering watchdog. Meanwhile, in a simultaneous raid on the Vatican Secretariat of State, prosecutors seized documents, computers, telephones and passports.

It seems to be a dirty business. According to the Italian press, police want to know more about a multi-million-pound real estate transaction in Mayfair. Significantly, all the seized documents reportedly relate to the years when Cardinal Angelo Becciu, a close papal ally, was running the Secretariat of State’s offices.

In this episode of Holy Smoke, Damian joined by Vatican-watcher Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith. We discuss what he calls Rome's culture of 'obsessive secrecy', the unwillingness of the mainstream media to investigate Vatican scandals, and ask what John Henry Newman, who will be canonised this weekend, would have made of the cringe-making Amazon Synod...
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26 min
October 03, 2019 The strange religion of cryptocurrency
In this week's episode of Holy Smoke Damian is joined by Jamie Bartlett, one of the world’s leading experts on the dark web, radical politics and technology, whose gripping podcast series The Missing Cryptoqueen is currently being broadcast by the BBC. It tells the story of a shady Bulgarian tech entrepreneur, Dr Ruja Ignatova, who vanished just as her dodgy cryptocurrency OneCoin was raking in billions of euros from investors – or true believers – all over the world.

Despite her disappearance, it still has footholds in African villages, the Chinese business community, Scottish housing estates and Britain’s Muslims – it claims to be Sharia-compliant. Not only does Dr Ruja's operation resemble a religious cult, it also gives us a glimpse of how technology and belief are combining in ever stranger patterns, often inspired by the utopians of Silicon Valley.

Presented by Damian Thompson.

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32 min