The Sacred

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 religions will always be just out of reach.

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 two acting brothers, Lawrence and Jack.

We spoke why it’s hard to depict faith on film, if we can ever know what we hold sacred and why we shouldn’t want to know personal details about celebrities.

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.

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 episode is still one of our most listened to, for hosting this special podcast. Ian is a British journalist and editor of the political news website, politics.co.uk.

We are going to be taking a little break over Christmas so this will be our last episode for about a month. We’ll be back in the New Year with our interview with Danny Finkelstein, and our re-recorded episode with Richard Ayoade and Lydia Fox.

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.

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.

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.

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 of being real, her difficult relationship with the Church of England and her decision to walk away from it, and why it’s so difficult to talk about God in public.

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.