The Church Times Podcast

During the first lockdown, with public worship suspended, parish churches needed to make use of digital technology to broadcast services. Help has been provided by the digital team at Church House, led by the C of E’s head of digital communications Adrian Harris. On this week’s podcast, Ed Thornton talks to Adrian and his colleague Amaris Cole, senior digital communications manager, about how chur...

Churches have been supporting the footballer Marcus Rashford’s call to tackle half-term hunger this week, after MPs voted against a Labour motion to extend free school-meal vouchers to the school holidays. The Revd Lizzi Green, Assistant Curate of Gossops Green and Bewbush, in the diocese of Chichester, has personal experience of food insecurity. She writes in this week’s Church Times: “I am all t...

Everybody Now is a podcast about what it means to be human on the threshold of a global climate emergency, in a time of systemic injustice and runaway pandemics. Scientists, activists, farmers, poets, and theologians talk bravely and frankly about how our biosphere is changing, about grief and hope in an age of social collapse and mass extinction, and about taking action against all the odds. On 1...

This week, Ed Thornton talks to the historian and author Tom Holland about a new collection of essays he has edited, Revolutionary: Who was Jesus? Why does he still matter? (SPCK). “If you regard Jesus as just an enlightened teacher, then, ultimately, he’s no different to philosophers, teachers from other periods of history. . . But if what the gospels, the New Testament, the Church teaches is tru...

This week’s podcast features a talk by the Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, the Very Revd Professor Martyn Percy, given at the Church Times Festival of Preaching, which took place virtually last week. His talk is titled “The Verb of God made flesh — Jesus, love, and learning in a post-Covid Church.” “Instead of constantly trying to present a Church triumphant, what about a Church that is receptive,...

On this week’s podcast, Ed Thornton talks to the theologian and poet Bishop Graham Kings about his recently released collection of poems, Nourishing Connections (Canterbury Press). They are joined by Silvia Dimitrova, who has worked with Bishop Graham on his Nourishing Connections project (www.grahamkings.org) over the past 17 years and produced seven accompanying paintings of Women in the Bible,...

On the podcast this week, the Revd A. D. A France-Williams reads from his book Ghost Ship: Institutional racism and the Church of England (SCM Press). “To love oneself as a black person in the UK is an act of resistance to the pressures and powers that are actively bearing down to disassemble whatever sense of identity one can muster.” Ghost Ship was reviewed in the Church Times by the Revd Arling...

On this week’s podcast, Ed Thornton talks to author and Church Times columnist Paul Vallely about his new book, Philanthropy: From Aristotle to Zuckerberg (Bloomsbury). The book was reviewed in last week’s Church Times by Alan Billings, who writes: “‘Philanthropy’”, as used by Paul Vallely, is elastic enough to range from the widow’s mite to Bill Gates’s billions, from a religious duty to a volunt...

On the podcast this week, rapper and playwright Testament interviews Leroy Logan, former superintendent in the Metropolitan police and co-founder of the National Black Police Association. They discuss Logan’s forthcoming book, Closing Ranks: My Life as a Cop – including his early experiences as a black police officer and his founding of the NBPA — as well as his faith, family, and what he hopes th...

On this week’s podcast, Ed Thornton talks to Joe Walsh, founder of Faith in Operation, an initiative which invites Christians to consider giving a kidney to a stranger. They discuss the prospect of this “altruistic kidney donation” ending the transplantation waiting list, as well as Joe’s own experience of kidney donation and the effect of the coronavirus on those awaiting transplants. “After givi...

On this week’s podcast, Ed Thornton talks to journalist, broadcaster, and campaigner Andrew Graystone about his new book, Faith, Hope and Mischief: Tiny acts of rebellion by an everyday activist (Canterbury Press). Andrew is the person who, after the mass shooting in a mosque in Christchurch, stood outside his local mosque in Manchester with a cardboard sign saying, “You are my friends. I'll watch...

The Mirror and the Light, the conclusion to Dame Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, was published in March, and has since been nominated for both the Booker Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. It was reviewed by Alec Ryrie in the Church Times here. On this week’s podcast — taken from our archive — Dame Hilary and Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch reflect on the life of Thomas Cromwell and his pla...

This week, we’ve visited the archive for an interview between Andrew Brown and bestselling historian Tom Holland, whose book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind is now out in paperback. “This isn’t a history of Christianity,” Holland says. “It’s a history of what’s been revolutionary and transformative about Christianity: about how Christianity has transformed not just the West, but the entir...

On the podcast this week, Vicky Walker talks to author and theologian Tara Isabella Burton about her new book, Strange Rites: New religions for a godless world. They discuss the breakdown of public trust in major religious (and other) institutions, the subsequent rise of wellness culture in the US and beyond, and the part that technology plays in the formation of identity, community, and spiritual...

This week’s podcast guest is Karen Gibson, the founder and director of the Kingdom Choir. She wrote for the Church Times last week about how her mother, a member of the Windrush generation, was asked not to return to a C of E church 50 years ago, but recently received an impassioned apology from its new vicar. Karen talks to Ed Thornton about her mother’s reaction to the apology and the conversati...

This week, we bring a talk given by Malcolm Guite at the sixth Church Times Festival of Faith and Literature, in Oxfordshire, in February. Drawing on some of his own sonnets from his collection, Parable and Paradox (Canterbury Press, 2016), and on the work of Donne and Herbert, Malcolm explores the two great commandments, and, more widely, the call and response of love in the Christian life. His m...

On this week’s podcast, Ed Thornton talks to Ysenda Maxtone Graham about her new book, British Summer Time Begins: The school summer holidays 1930-1980 (Little, Brown) (Church Times Bookshop £17.10). Ysenda has written a piece on holidays and churchgoing for this week’s Church Times. They discuss Christian house-swaps and clergy holidays, as well as how much the school summer holiday experience ha...

The Coronavirus, Church & You survey was set up to assess experiences of and responses to the Covid-19 pandemic among churchgoers in the UK. In this week’s podcast, Church Times editor Paul Handley discusses the results of the survey with its creators, the Revd Andrew Village, Professor of Practical and Empirical Theology, and Canon Leslie J. Francis, Visiting Professor of Theology and Religious S...

On the podcast this week, Canon Jessica Martin reads an extract from her much-anticipated new book, Holiness and Desire: What makes us who we are? The extract is published in this week’s Church Times (3 July). “Trusting the scriptures is not wilful blindness, but a speaking act of love. Because of love, I believe that the power of a medieval anonymous lyric to move me to tears signals an authentic...

The final of Theology Slam 2020, a competition to find engaging young voices who think theologically about the contemporary world, took place online on Tuesday 23 June. On this week’s podcast, you can hear the talks of the three finalists, who spoke on Theology and Disability, Theology and #MeToo, and Theology and Race. “‘Where are you?’ is the cry of the human spirit to God. It’s written on the p...

This week’s podcast guest is Chine McDonald, a writer, broadcaster, and Head of Community Fundraising and Public Engagement at Christian Aid. Chine has written the Lift Up Your Hearts article for this week’s Church Times, and talks to Ed Thornton about how books, art, and music — as well as her faith — have sustained her during lockdown. “The Christ that I believe in is a Christ who . . . suffers...

On this week’s podcast, Ed Thornton talks to Augustine Tanner-Ihm about racism in the Church of England and beyond. “I really wanted to share God’s love, transform this society with the gospel of Jesus Christ, and do it in whatever context God calls me to.” Augustine, who recently completed his ordinand training at Cranmer Hall, Durham and has since been applying for curacies, received an email re...

“All that we’ve ever done is about getting young people out of their rooms and into the community and working alongside us, and through lockdown we’ve been doing the opposite of that. . . So that has been very difficult.” On this week’s podcast, Ed Thornton talks to Gareth Sorsby, joint CEO of YMCA Exeter, about the impact of the coronavirus on an organisation whose work is grounded in face-to-fac...

On the podcast this week, Church Times columnists Paul Vallely and Angela Tilby discuss the big story of the week: Dominic Cummings’s trip from London to County Durham during the lockdown. They talk about (and disagree on) whether the public outrage has been fair, and consider the reactions of the bishops. Writing in this week’s Church Times, Paul Vallely says: “Mr Cummings, with his legal loophol...

This week, Ed Thornton talks to Madeleine Davies about her new book, Lights for the Path: A guide through grief, pain and loss, published today (21 May) by SPCK. It’s available to order from the Church Times Bookshop for the special price £8, and an extract is published in this week’s Church Times. “Lights for the Path is part memoir and part theological reflection on the theme of death,” the Head...