Thought for the Day

By BBC Radio 4Religion & Spirituality

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Thought for the Day episodes

June 02 Professor Tina Beattie
02 JUNE 26
3 min
June 01 Bishop Philip North
01 JUNE 26
3 min
May 30 Brian Draper
30 MAY 26
3 min
May 29 Rev Dr Giles Fraser
29 MAY 26
4 min
May 28 The Rev Lucy Winkett
Good morning. The late rock singer Ozzy Osbourne’s son, Jack, spoke recently about the fact that the family have worked with an AI provider to make a digital version of his father a year after his death. Digital Ozzy, an AI generated life-sized avatar, will be able, from beyond the grave, to talk, laugh, answer questions from and tease whoever wants to speak with him; just as Ozzy Osborne did when he was alive. The CEO of the AI company making this, commented that the avatar’s created from ‘authenticated source material, consented and controlled by those who love him most’. His choice of language is striking. Love and control. Living and consent. There is a growing market – estimated at more than £100 billion worldwide for the ‘grief tech’ industry, including what are called griefbots: an AI tool that recreates the dead as a comfort for the living.
Organised religion, until recent decades, exercising a near-monopoly on the rituals and processes around death, might reasonably be supposed to be against this. But as evidenced by Pope Leo’s first encyclical released on Monday, which addresses humanity’s relationship with AI, the need for public debate about the ethics and morality of the use of AI is urgent, given the speed of change in its capabilities. The starting point for the consideration of a grief bot is that the inalienable dignity of a human being who’s lived, according to Christian teaching, as someone created in the image of God, continues after death. But we know too that at the point of death, we no longer have any control over how we’re spoken about, how our past actions are interpreted. We’re no longer able to explain ourselves or surprise even the ones who love us best and miss us most. We are, in a curious way, at our most vulnerable, to exploitation or misuse by anyone who might make money from our memory. In this way, dying is the ultimate act of trust - not only in God - but in the people we leave behind. We can ask them to promise us that they will say certain things, scatter our ashes in certain places, live a certain way themselves. But we can’t make them, we have to trust them. Perhaps we begin by recognising that the messy, contradictory, heartache of grief is tender territory whenever it’s invaded by commercialising forces. And in the use of a griefbot, the inalienable dignity of a person is under question at precisely the time when the person who’s died has no voice to contest what’s being done in their name. Love and control. Living and consent.
The choices of individuals who have the funds to do this for the people they’ve lost raise fundamental questions not just for them but for all the rest of us in society – who, inevitably, will die one day too.
4 min
May 27 Mona Siddiqui
On Monday over one and a half million Muslims from around the world began filling a vast tent city in Mecca for the annual hajj pilgrimage. Each year this religious practice which Muslims hope to perform at least once in their life, tests people’s faith and physical stamina. But this year, there’s another more sobering reality. Air defence batteries are positioned on the outskirts of Mecca, responsible for protecting the skies over the holy sites. And this is a consequence of the continued US-Israeli war in Iran and the most recent Israeli military strikes in eastern Lebanon, wars which are reconfiguring who gets to travel, how they get there, and at what cost.
And amidst the hopes for an end to the war, I wonder how people living and affected by it think about such momentous rituals as Hajj, how they plan, save and travel only to return to continued uncertainty once the pilgrimage is over. Perhaps people have learned how to live beside ruins without letting the ruins destroy their soul. It is said that Lebanon in particular has always sung while burning. Its poets turned ruins into hymns and mourning into the resistance of stubborn hope. But it seems to me that wherever there is war and destruction in the world people learn to live with both grief and hope. Cafés and shops reopen after explosions, children play on the streets, weddings happen during ceasefires, cities still wake up to make coffee by the sea; survival itself becomes a kind of ritual.
Maybe that is why so many people want to perform Hajj this year - ritual isn’t escapism from the world’s violence. It is resistance against becoming spiritually shaped by that violence. People who live close to loss ask deeper questions about God, justice, and meaning. The pilgrimage is a kind of surrender to a greater reality – everyone moves in the same direction, recites the same prayers, dressed in similar garments, and despite their different burdens, the crowds repeat the simple but powerful call ` here I am O Lord, here I am.’
And for one suspended moment, as the pilgrims stand as the guests of God, they begin to realise something terrifying and beautiful- that every empire, every militia, every border, every war will one day become dust. That it isn’t suffering but the need for divine mercy for us all which is the final truth about humanity.
3 min
May 26 Vishvapani - A member of the Triratna Buddhist Order
Good morning. An odd group gathered this weekend at the Hay Festival for a simple but moving ceremony. Local authority officials joined storytellers and puppeteers beside the River Wye to launch a charter declaring that the river has rights – rights to perform its natural functions and be free from pollution. It’s the latest expression of a global movement demanding that the law sees ecosystems as living entities rather than human property.
I love walking the Wye. It winds 150 miles along the Wales-England border through lush pastures and rocky gorges. Yet, there are concerns that some industrial farming practices while not necessarily illegal are polluting the river and that species like salmon and native crayfish that depend on it are disappearing. The charter recognises an ecologist as the river’s official representative at rive r management meetings. The Wye can’t tell us what it wants, so she’s charged to present what the river needs to flourish, setting aside human interests and preferences.
This legal arrangement gives form to something we’ve long felt but struggled to enact. The poet William Wordsworth, who celebrated the Wye, sensed that people and rivers belong to something more fundamental, "more deeply interfused" as he writes. But I think the thirteenth century Japanese Buddhist teacher Dōgen Zenji saw most clearly what that perception really means.
Dōgen knew that a river can be seen as a resource, a place of inspiration, and presumably it’s something quite different to the fish. But all these perceptions fall short of a more elusive reality. As Dōgen writes, “It's not only that there is water in the world, but there’s a world in water.”
We typically live as though we were separate — each of us the centre of our own world, bending what surrounds us to our interests. Buddhism calls this the core delusion and the source of our suffering. So our response to nature is also a call to look at ourselves more deeply, asking not just whether a river is alive, but what it means for us to be alive, within a vast universe on which we entirely depend.
The Wye is one of the most loved rivers in Britain, and one of the most damaged. The charter gives it rights. But the rights of nature return to us as duties of attention, restraint, and repair — not just in beautiful places, but at every point where our lives touch the world that sustains them.
4 min
May 25 Bishop Nick Baines
25 MAY 26
3 min
May 23 Rev Canon Dr Rob Marshall
Good morning.
Those attending the National Cathedrals Conference in Bristol this week were asked a simple question: what is the role of a cathedral today? They reflected on a specially commissioned report Living Stones which offered some sobering conclusions about the future of English cathedrals.
There was some good news. 77% of adults have visited a cathedral in the past three years. This suggests that many people still see cathedrals as “thin places” where they can glimpse heaven on earth and, as one of the Psalms says, “be still and know”.
But the more worrying statistic is that three quarters of England’s 42 Anglican cathedrals are in debt. The growing gap between income and repair costs is difficult to ignore.
In his book How Buildings Learn, the American writer Stewart Brand argues that buildings survive by adapting to the people who use them. Cathedrals have done this for centuries. And, in a noisy digital age, they face a new challenge: how once again to reimagine themselves.
Many cathedrals now rely on admission charges, concerts, exhibitions, cafés and other attractions to help cover their costs. . For some, this feels like an attack on the essential quality of what is after all a sacred building. It’s a fine balancing act to be sure.
My experience of cathedrals has shaped much of my ministry. York Minster was my home cathedral. I studied near Durham, I was ordained in Ripon, and now serve as an Honorary Canon of St Albans Cathedral. This has given me a closer understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing cathedral clergy and their lay colleagues today.
Perhaps the real question isn’t how cathedrals can survive, but why they still matter. When in the Cathedral, I often notice that many visitors still come looking for a moment - to pause, to light a candle to pray. I see people of all ages — including many young adults — wanting to stop, to rest, to listen to the silence, if only for a little while.
The medieval builders of these vast places — vividly imagined in Ben Hopkins’ novel Cathedral — could never have foreseen the technologies that now shape almost every aspect of modern life. But I’m pretty certain they understood that people would always seek out their wonderful creations: as a calm sanctuary in stark contrast to the world outside. That, perhaps more than anything else, is what our cathedrals are still for today and why we need them to survive.
4 min
May 22 Mona Siddiqui
I don’t really follow football but this past week there seemed to be a lot of it in the news. One of the most contentious stories has been that of Southampton who admitted to spying on their opponents training sessions. They’ve now lost their appeal against expulsion from the Championship play-offs, which they described as `manifestly disproportionate.’ For many of the fans who are hurt it may seem like an unfair and collective punishment.
But while the fallout has been enormous, the issue isn’t really about the consequences for breaking a rule. Football survives mistakes, controversy and questionable refereeing decisions every week. What it can’t survive is the erosion of trust. Once clubs begin believing covert spying and deception are acceptable routes to competitive advantage, the integrity of the sport itself starts to erode. Competition in all areas of life must still have moral boundaries because if winning becomes the only value left, then every other principle gradually becomes negotiable. Whether in football, politics business or our relationships, a culture obsessed purely with outcomes eventually loses the moral language needed to restrain itself. Success begins to justify deception and eventually people no longer even recognise dishonesty because it has become so normalised by success.
But if restraint is important so is the principle of proportionality. The Qur’an says, ` we have made you a middle nation’ a verse which inspired Muslim thinkers to regard balance and equilibrium as a spiritual act. A small wound shouldn’t become a lifelong bitterness, a mistake shouldn’t lead to total exile and justice should always be distinguishable from revenge. This isn’t weakness, its God consciousness contained in the sacred words, `By justice, the heavens and the earth endure.’ When so much of our culture encourages us towards extremes, cutting people off, letting disagreement turn to dehumanising, and destroying peoples reputations, the courage to remain fair even when you’re hurting or angry is a difficult but necessary virtue.
On losing their appeal Southampton issued a statement apologising to their fans and supporters stating that `trust now needs to be rebuilt’ and that they were determined to act with humility and `put things right.” And in the end that is all any of us can hope to do whether in sport or in life in general. All of us carry a relationship we could mend, a trust we can uphold, and while its not always easy, perhaps one of the quietest forms of spiritual maturity is the ability to put something right before time makes the repair impossible.
4 min