Thought for the Day

By BBC Radio 4Religion & Spirituality

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Thought for the Day episodes

August 21 Dr Krish Kandiah
21 AUG 26
4 min
August 20 The Reverend Lucy Winkett
20 AUG 26
4 min
August 19 Mona Siddiqui
What does it mean to erase a woman? You don't have to kill her. You can simply make her invisible. Tell her she can’t get a higher education, she can’t work freely, tell her where she can go, who she can speak to, and how loudly she can speak. Eventually, you don't need to silence her because her absence has been made normal.
Five years after the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan, women and girls have told the BBC their lives are unrecognisable under the rule of the regime. The Taliban's foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, was asked by the BBC about education for girls in Afghanistan, to which he replied that "it is not correct to say everything is banned for women", "Women are not totally restricted on all walks of life... Only one small part (of their affairs) is restricted until further notice."
And while there is some disagreement within the Taliban as well as condemnation from many Muslim voices and organisations, those who rule say they are doing this in the name of Islam. But a government that needs to control the movement, clothing, education and voice of women in the name of morality, a morality that requires women to disappear isn’t showing strength; it’s showing fear dressed as piety. Because often across all faiths, religious authority which says `We know what God wants’ always conveniently discovers that what God wants looks remarkably like what we want. And that’s why gradually the word woman is ignored from the Qur’anic verses which speak of the moral agency of “the believing men and believing women, the devout men and devout women, the truthful men and truthful women.”
Today the women of Afghanistan have become a political and theological test. But perhaps the most dangerous thing is the possibility that the world will eventually become accustomed to it. Because oppression has a final victory. Not when people are silenced, but when their silence no longer disturbs us.
And yet despite all of this, many women tell the BBC, `One day, everything will change... but we must continue with patience, and we will not lose hope." A government can close a school, it can close a university, it can close a woman's workplace but it can’t destroy the future she imagines.’ In the words of the Afghan poet, Nadia Anjuman, who wrote in her poem `My Garden’: `I will trust the meaning of hope, I will shut the door on grief and find another path.’
3 min
August 18 The Rev Dr Michael Spence
Good morning.
I have spent about half my life in England and half in Australia. Watching the television news over the past few weeks has been somewhat confusing. I think of England as a place where nature is more or less under control, a ‘green and pleasant land’, mild in climate, with a landscape shaped by generations of human hands. Raging wildfires, the terrifying unpredictability of nature out of control, railway engineering disrupted by scorching heat, that seems part of a different place. That reminds me of my childhood, driving through areas destroyed by bushfire, areas in which, as the poet Judith Wright put it , “Charred death upon the rock leans his charred bone and stares at death from sockets black with flame.”
Reflecting on nature ‘under control’ as opposed to ‘out of control’, I wonder if this notion of ‘control’ isn’t exactly where the problem lies. At least since the industrial revolution, we have tended to see the natural world as brute matter for moulding to our will, as so much ‘stuff’ to be exploited, to be consumed. That approach has brought progress, but also the damage to our planet and the climate change from which we now suffer. Our thirst for ‘control’ has led us to a place where many young people, faced with an ecological crisis, feel more ‘out of control’ than ever before.
The bewitching vision of the writer of the book of Genesis is so very different. In the garden story, the relationship between the human and the natural world is not one of ‘control’ but of ‘authority’, of rule with a delegated responsibility for the natural world. Nature in this tradition is both an essentially good gift, and one damaged by rebellion against its giver, the Creator. It is therefore to be treasured, but not to be worshipped, nor even simply affirmed. So, we are right to be grateful for fire when it warms, and to be repelled by it when it kills. The human responsibility is not to ‘control’ nature but to tend it as one tends a garden, to work with it when we can, and to work for its healing when we can’t. In this vein, for example, science has recently affirmed the wisdom of ancient Aboriginal Australian practices of fire management, practices that by contained burning, by working with, rather than against ‘country’, limit the occurrence of more devastating fire.
Had we listened more carefully to the Genesis story over the last two hundred and fifty years, and less to the logic of consumption and control, we might now be in a better place ecologically. Reflecting on the story at this point, may just give our planet a chance.
3 min
August 17 Bishop James Jones
17 AUG 26
4 min
August 15 Catherine Pepinster
TODAY, AUGUST 15, is traditionally the day that Catholics celebrate the feast of the Assumption, that marks Mary, mother of Jesus, being taken both body and soul into heaven. Countless Catholics even before the Church made it official dogma, believed it.
What intrigues me, though, is when the Church did make the Assumption dogma. It was confirmed by Pope Pius XII in 1950. So just five years after the end of the Second World War, when millions of Jewish people lost their lives in the Holocaust, the Catholic Church officially endorsed a Jewish woman as Queen of Heaven.
There’s still controversy about Pius XII, elected Pope in 1939. Some historians argue that he didn’t do enough for the Jewish people, while others say he worked behind the scenes to help save Jews from the Nazis. Before he became Pope, as Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the Vatican Secretary of State, he signed on behalf of his predecessor, Pius XI, the 1933 concordat that guaranteed the rights of the Catholic Church to operate in Germany.
What is less well-known is that four years later, horrified by what was happening in Germany – and monitored by Pacelli – the Vatican issued a papal teaching document or encyclical on the situation there. Called With Burning Anxiety, it was written in German, not the usual Latin, and read out in all Catholic Churches in Germany on Palm Sunday, 1937.
It endorsed the Jewish scriptures as worthy of respect and condemned the exaltation of race – in other words the Nazi obsession with the Aryan race. This so infuriated the Nazis they tried to confiscate copies of the encyclical.
While that document was published by Pius XI and probably authored by Pacelli, it was also probably influenced by the thinking of a Jewish woman, Edith Stein. Stein, a philosopher, converted to Catholicism and became a Carmelite nun. Stein was later arrested and died in Auschwitz in 1942. Her extensive body of writing, including the substantial letter she wrote to Pius XI, warning of the Nazis’ desire to destroy the Jews and their idolising of race and power, as well as her thinking on Mary, survives.
Stein saw Mary as the ideal woman, nurturing and sustaining others. A woman imitate Mary, not only in the home but in the workplace, Stein wrote, “conscious of where there is want and where help is needed, intervening and regulating as far as it is possible….Then will she, like a good spirit, spread blessing everywhere.”
A good spirit that spreads blessings everywhere – that is an aspiration inspired by one Jewish woman writing of another and one I cherish on the feast of the Assumption.
4 min
August 14 Vishvapani - A member of the Triratna Buddhist Order
Good morning.
I’ve lived in Wales for the best part of two decades and slowly felt less of an outsider. But last week I found myself in deepest Cymru, at the Eisteddfod: the annual festival of Welsh language, music and literature, which this year took place near Cardigan framed by the Preseli hills.
The Eisteddfod is a cultural celebration but it draws on druidic ceremonies. My friend became a member of the Gorsedd: imagine a combination of getting an MBE and a druid initiation. She swore on a sword to uphold Welsh culture, and received a kind of blessing from the Archdruid, the First Minister looking on in his druid robes.
It was a moment of pride in Welsh identity but sometimes nationalist narratives make me uneasy. I can’t help but wonder who it excludes. My discomfort no doubt stems from being the son of a Jewish refugee from Nazism. The universality of Buddhist teachings was always part of its draw — but even that can be co-opted by nationalist politics.
And yet, as a Jewish Buddhist from Croydon, I respond to the powerful rootedness that’s so palpable at the Eisteddfod.
My friend runs a small meeting space in the festival, and I crowded in with a few dozen others for a performance featuring a storyteller and Catrin Finch, the harpist – a celebration of awen: of the land and its tales.
I don't speak Welsh, but I could roughly follow the stories, which came from the Mabinogion, the compendium of Welsh myths, many about this part of Wales. One featured Rhiannon, a queen wrongly accused of killing her child. As a penance she must sit at the castle gates, tell visitors her story and offer to carry them across the threshold.
In the performance, Rhiannon’s passionate cry declared the love and hope still burning within her. But she sets her fury aside, carries strangers on her back, and becomes larger than the pattern of blame and revenge. Buddhism calls this the deepest freedom — not escaping suffering but refusing to be imprisoned by it.
The awen I respond to transcends borders. The Preseli rocks were taken east to build Stonehenge — raised partly to track the sun’s movements. This week, as the sky darkened over the whole of Britain, it struck me that this magic was never only Wales's to possess. It belongs to anyone willing to receive it.
4 min
August 13 Rev Lucy Winkett
13 AUG 26
4 min
August 12 Dr Rachel Mann
Good morning. In a twist I had not anticipated, it would appear that for some young people at least, digital cameras and wired earphones are back. The technology of my youth — iPods and Walkmans — is being embraced by Gen Z. Indeed, social media is full of people talking about why they're going back to basics, using devices that many of us consigned to the bin years ago.
As someone who loves shiny new tech I’ve been left wondering what is going on. Well, while some have said that older tech is higher quality, others have expressed a strong sense of nostalgia for reminders of simpler times.
Nostalgia is an idea with a rich and complex history. The historian Agnes Arnold-Forster has written brilliantly about how modern ideas of nostalgia emerged in seventeenth-century Switzerland where it was held to be a disease of home sickness which could quite literally kill you. These days nostalgia is just as likely to be co-opted by advertising agencies to sell us stuff or by politicians to pitch their latest policies.
The Bible treats nostalgia with suspicion. In the book of Ecclesiastes it says, ‘Do not say, ‘Why were the former days better than these?’ For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.’ Its writer challenges the rose-tinted glow we can feel when looking back on the past. This view chimes with the famous story of the Israelites who, lost in the desert on the way to the promised land, look back fondly on their days of bondage in Egypt. Their leader Moses shakes them out of their reverie and gets them to start looking forward again.
Certainly, nostalgia can be understood as sentimental and regressive. The poet Billy Collins captures this brilliantly in his satirical poem ‘Nostalgia’ in which the speaker is so enamoured with the past that he ends up believing that even a few hours ago is better than now.
However, I don’t think looking back fondly is necessarily retrograde or bad. Agnes Arnold-Forster also says, ‘Nostalgia can help us re-enchant the past’. On Sunday I worshipped at a Book of Common Prayer service. I felt a wave of nostalgia for its exquisite seventeenth-century language, but I also felt profoundly connected to God in the present. The old language quieted me. I was freed from the frenetic and distracting shape of my ordinary life. The past came alive but so did my present.
In their own way, perhaps those young people using older tech might also feel freed from the frenetic modern world. Certainly, I am reminded that while I find the challenge of the new compelling, there are riches to be found in how the present is illuminated by looking back to the past.
3 min
August 11 Professor Tina Beattie
11 AUG 26
4 min