In light of recent terrorist attacks in Sydney, Simon Smart reflects on the extraordinary acts of forgiveness and love amidst communal tension seen in the aftermath. 23/04/2024 A little over a week ago, the peace of a gloriously sunny autumn Saturday afternoon here in Sydney was shattered when a mentally disturbed man wandered into a Bondi shopping centre, pulled out a 30cm knife, and began attacking random people. He clearly targeted women. Six people died, five of them female. A nine–month–old baby girl was stabbed in the abdomen. She underwent emergency surgery and eventually pulled throug ..read more

Nick Spencer speaks with Cambridge University Professor of Theology & Natural Sciences, Andrew Davison. 23/04/2024 Little green men were once a complete fantasy – but the numbers appear to be on their side. The sheer size of the universe, the number of stars and, it seems, the number of potentially inhabitable planets means that alien life is highly probable. What would it mean for us if that were so? If we did ever ‘make contact’? What would it mean for our sense of pride, our dignity and in particular for those belief systems that have a particular emphasis on the human species? In t ..read more

Hannah Rich discusses her report Love’s Labours on BBC Radio 4 Sunday. 21/04/2024 Hannah Rich discusses her new report Love’s Labours: Good work, care work and a mutual economy on BBC Radio 4’s Sunday programme.  Love’s Labours explores what ‘love’ means in the context of care work and how rediscovering it might lead us to value care work more highly. You can listen to the full segment, from 07:55, here. Interested in this? Share it on social media. Join our monthly e–newsletter to keep up to date with our latest research and events. And check out our Suppo ..read more

The following is an exclusive column featured in our Monthly Newsletter where Chine McDonald reflects on Richard Dawkins’ coming out as a ‘cultural Christian’. Interested in having these blogs land straight in your inbox? Be sure to sign up to our newsletter using the link at the bottom of the page! There’s been a lot of talk – at least in the echo chamber that is social media – about Richard Dawkins’ coming out as, in his words, a “cultural Christian”.  In an interview with LBC last week, the evolutionary biologist, who once likened religion to the smallpox – only harder to eradicate ..read more

Chine McDonald speaks to Nick Spencer about his new book, co–authored with Hannah Waite, Playing God: Science, Religion and the Future of Humanity. 16/04/2024 Every century is different – but the 21st may be seriously different, with our ability to understand, modify and re–create humanity having come on light years in recent decades. Should we? So often, the warning we hear when it comes to the scientific manipulation of the human is that we shouldn’t “play God”. But what grounding does that actually have? What if we actually are a “playing God” species? Kicking off a new series of Reading ..read more

Hannah Rich unpacks the key themes from her latest report ‘Love’s Labours’. 15/04/2024 Love is not, admittedly, the starting point of most policy analyses or reports. Perhaps one of the perks of being a theological think tank is how naturally we are able to approach apparently economic problems through the lens of concepts like love. Our new report, Love’s Labours, does just that, exploring the crisis in adult social care from this perspective.  It is undeniable that, economically and structurally, there is a deepening crisis in social care which affects both care recipients and care wor ..read more

Hannah Rich’s report exploring what ‘love’ means in the context of care work and how rediscovering it might lead us to value care work more highly. 15/04/2024 About the report  There is a crisis facing the adult social care sector in the UK at present, which is not only economic in nature, but also relational. The devaluation of paid care work in economic terms stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of what care is, what work is and even what love is.   Different workspaces, cultures and working conditions have the power to create different kinds of human relationships and f ..read more

Markus Bockmuehl reviews Catherine Nixey’s book Heresy. 09/04/2024 Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age (2017) was a prize–winning, swashbuckling takedown of Christianity as antiquity’s Taliban, single–handedly responsible for the destruction of classical civilization. Here was Edward Gibbon on steroids; reviewers who like that sort of thing found it little short of exhilarating. Others seemed irked by a “one–sided” and “sardonic” argument and a “hectoring” zeal disinclined to “nuance’” say in distinguishing between fringe extremists and majorities, or in bothering to tangle with scholarly vie ..read more

Nick Spencer pays tribute to the hugely influential psychologist Daniel Kahneman who died recently, and shows how his ideas about human nature were both pioneeringly new and rather old. 27/03/2024 1. Sinful Adam “If we admit the fall of our first Parents”, wrote pioneer chemist Robert Boyle in 1675 [Reason and Religion], we will not be surprised to discover that “our Passions and Interests, and oftentimes our Vices pervert our Intellects.” “Our understandings”, he continued, “are universally biased, and impos’d upon by our Wills and Affections.” This was a familiar lament in the seventeenth c ..read more

Elizabeth Oldfield speaks with social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. 27/03/2024 Introduction  Elizabeth Hello and welcome to The Sacred. My name is Elizabeth Oldfield and this is a podcast about the deep values of the people who shape our public conversations. Every episode I speak to someone who has some kind of public voice or public platform and I try and get a sense of their story, their principles, the way they see the world and how they have got to where they are now. I speak to people from a really wide range of professional, political and metaphysical perspectives, in the hope tha ..read more