The Sacred

What happens when the person behind the punchlines isn't quite who you'd expect?This week, comedian, satirist, pianist and novelist Rachel Parris joins us to talk about life in comedy, being a woman in the public eye, and the experience of living with anxiety while performing for a living.Rachel reflects on having to fight to be taken seriously in an industry where she's often been underestimated, and the eight-minute satirical piece she wrote in response to the murder of Sarah Everard and the government's failure to protect women. We also explore the unexpected places she has found peace, why creativity is essential to her wellbeing, and whether you really have to be a certain kind of person to be funny.In this conversation, we also cover:Finding peace while living with anxietyThe importance of nature, awe and noticing the world around usMotherhood and the experience of being a woman in comedyWhy do we assume that comedians are troubled?Challenging the rules of comedyJane Austen and the overlooked women in her novels🎙️ Listen to The Sacred: linktr.ee/sacredpodcast 📖 Follow Elizabeth Oldfield: www.elizabetholdfield.com/ 💡 The Sacred is produced by Theos Think Tank in partnership with Comment Magazine, and with support from The Jerusalem Trust and Open Society Foundations👉 Rachel's latest book, Introducing Mrs Collins: A Pride and Prejudice Novel is available here: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/rachel-parris/introducing-mrs-collins/9780316602358/?lens=little-brown-and-company 👇 Our guests and listeners to our podcast come from all kinds of perspectives and what draws us together is a desire to be self-aware about our own values and curious about other peoples. Comment your reflections below, we read them all.Copyright: "don't crash the car (stripped) - Instrumental" by dollhouse (2:40) Licensed by The Music Bed LLC"Sketching the Sunrise" by On Earth (3:38) Licensed by The Music Bed LLCIn this conversation we also cover:The importance of natureFinding peace in a chaotic worldWhy she doesn't believe in the rules of comedy

What happens when the AI tools we used to make life easier started to change the way we think?Journalist and author Jamie Bartlett joins Elizabeth Oldfield for a live recording to explore what AI reveals about human nature, why we keep using tools we’re worried about, and what we risk losing when we let machines do our thinking for us.We talk about: • How using AI has affected Jamie’s own writing and thinking• Why language models can be so good at flattering us and exploiting our own biases • What it means to remain thoughtful and human in an age of increasingly capable machines • How we can learn to ask better questions - not just of AI, but of ourselves Jamie Bartlett is a journalist and author whose work explores the social and political consequences of technology. His books include How to Talk to AI, The People vs. Tech and Radicals. Thank you to everyone who joined us in the room and to those who sent us their thoughts on AI ahead of the evening. 🎙️ Listen to The Sacred: linktr.ee/sacredpodcast 📖 Follow Elizabeth Oldfield: www.elizabetholdfield.com/ 💡 The Sacred is produced by Theos Think Tank in partnership with Comment Magazine, and with support from The Jerusalem Trust and Open Society Foundations👉 Read Jamie's latest book, How to Talk to AI: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/475950/how-to-talk-to-ai-by-bartlett-jamie/9780753561980 👇 Our guests and listeners to our podcast come from all kinds of perspectives and what draws us together is a desire to be self-aware about our own values and curious about other peoples. Comment your reflections below, we read them all.Copyright: "Make You Mine - Instrumental" by Brooke Annibale Licensed by The Musicbed LLC"Beyond the Veil (feat. Khamir Music)" by Simon Wester Licensed by The Musicbed LLC

What Does It Take to Create a Shared Home in a Divided City?In Jerusalem, two women from opposite sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide, Riman Barakat and Karen Brunwasser, have spent more than a decade building FeelBeit, a shared arts and cultural space where Israeli and Palestinian artists and communities are invited to ‘feel at home’ together.In this moving conversation, recorded live at Aspen Ideas Festival, we explore what it takes to build trust across a profound divide—and what happens when that trust is tested by violence, grief and fear.We also cover:Friendship and why relationships can be a form of peacebuildingWhat happened at FeelBeit after October 7 and in the years sinceThe power of art to hold grief, anger, joy and hope at the same timeWhy “compassion over righteous indignation” and “self-love and self-critique” might be some of the hardest—and most necessary—practices for our societies🎙️ Listen to The Sacred: linktr.ee/sacredpodcast 📖 Follow Elizabeth Oldfield: www.elizabetholdfield.com/ 💡 The Sacred is produced by Theos Think Tank in partnership with Comment Magazine, and with support from The Jerusalem Trust and Open Society Foundations👉 Check out FeelBeit: https://feelbeit.com/underconstruction/Our guests and listeners to our podcast come from all kinds of perspectives and what draws us together is a desire to be self-aware about our own values and curious about other peoples. Comment your reflections below, we read them all 👇

Can you really vote your way to a good society - or does it have to be built house by house, street by street?Dr James Vitali - Head of Political Economy at Policy Exchange, a Sandhurst-trained army reservist, local councillor, and author of The Ownership Society: How Bourgeois Values Can Save Britain - talks about the Dorset church at the heart of his childhood, what military service taught him about sacrifice and leadership, and why he believes Britain's real crisis is moral, not economic.In this conversation we also explored:• Growing up between Navy deployments, and the community that stepped in • "Servant leadership" and why politics keeps failing to practise it • Home ownership, responsibility, and not being able to buy • Thatcher, Tocqueville, and where conservatism lost the plot • The human cost of localism - and what to do with the suffering in between🎙️ Listen to The Sacred: linktr.ee/sacredpodcast 📖 Follow Elizabeth Oldfield: www.elizabetholdfield.com/ 💡 The Sacred is produced by Theos Think Tank in partnership with Comment Magazine, and with support from The Jerusalem Trust and Open Society Foundations👉 Read James' book, The Ownership Society: How Bourgeois Values Can Save Britain https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=the-ownership-society-how-bourgeois-values-can-save-britain--9781509569526👇 Our guests and listeners to our podcast come from all kinds of perspectives and what draws us together is a desire to be self-aware about our own values and curious about other peoples. Comment your reflections below, we read them all.Chapters:00:00 – Intro: meeting James Vitali01:56 – What is sacred to you?04:13 – A rooted military childhood in Dorset10:32 – Faith, and how it shapes his politics15:27 – Sandhurst and learning servant leadership18:37 – Why politics became technical instead of moral20:43 – Thatcher's legacy and "no such thing as society"29:24 – Almshouses and the Vale Pantry: ownership in action32:24 – The Ownership Society: why "bourgeois values"?37:30 – A state that isn't neutral: "statecraft is soulcraft"44:12 – Elizabeth's own story, and why ownership matters to the soul53:07 – Closing reflections: "biography over beliefs"COPYRIGHT: "Video Cat Jazz" - Pär Hagström (Licensed by Epidemic Sound) & "Beyond the Veil" (feat. Khamir Music) by Simon Wester (Licensed by Musicbed).

What does it mean to prepare to die—and then discover that you need to prepare to live again?In this conversation, poet Christian Wiman reflects on faith, poetry, love, mortality, and his experience of living for more than 20 years with cancer. He talks about his turbulent childhood, how poetry transformed his anger into something creative, and why he believes poems can open us to something beyond ourselves.The conversation also explores:Wiman’s journey from economics to poetryWhat a poem actually is—and why sound can matter more than meaningAttention and his idea of “productive inattention”Faith, suffering, and writers including Simone Weil and Etty HillesumWiman also reads three poems: Five Houses Down, 2047 Grace Street, and In the Time of Fire.---🎙️ Listen to The Sacred: linktr.ee/sacredpodcast 📖 Follow Elizabeth Oldfield: www.elizabetholdfield.com/ 💡 The Sacred is produced by Theos Think Tank in partnership with Comment Magazine, and with support from The Jerusalem Trust and Open Society Foundations👉 See Christian Wiman's Poetry: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/christian-wiman --👇 Our guests and listeners to our podcast come from all kinds of perspectives and what draws us together is a desire to be self-aware about our own values and curious about other peoples. Comment your reflections below, we read them all.