The Sacred

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.

What are we losing by spending so much of our lives behind screens?COVID-19 brought the whole world online, and as a podcast we kind of stayed there. This season, we made a commitment to only recording in person, mostly at Elizabeth’s community house in south London. As a result, we sensed a big shift in our connection with guests and we thought we’d take an opportunity to reflect on a few things that we’d forgotten along the way:Being in-person is key to meeting people as real humans and creating non-transactional relationshipsSomething shifts when we eat snacks together and see each other’s homes Screens and the ease of our digital lives mean we spend less time in our bodies. It’s much more convenient — but what’s the hidden cost?We shrink when were alone, and we trust others less We feel challenged to spend more time with people in our bodies — looking each other in the eye, sharing physical space, and being present. We’d love to hear whether you’ve sensed a difference in our latest in-person episodes and your thoughts on being together in person.---🎙️Listen to The Sacred Podcast: https://linktr.ee/sacredpodcast📖 Follow Elizabeth Oldfield: https://www.elizabetholdfield.com/💡Produced by Theos Think Tank in partnership with Comment Magazine and with support from The Jerusalem Trust and Open Society Foundations

What do you do when you feel like an outsider?We spoke to Rabbi Angela Buchdahl who turned her experience of being a cultural and religious outsider into a source of strength. Raised in a biracial, mixed-faith American-Korean family, her identity was both welcomed and questioned in Korean and Jewish communities.She later would later go on to become one of the most prominent and influential public rabbis in the United States, the first female East Asian senior rabbi at NYC's Central Synagogue, and writer of the bestselling memoir Heart of a Stranger.We spoke about:Owning multiple identities, not fitting in and how to create a steady sense of selfThe religious conversion instinct and how to have religious humility Key Hebrew ideas that Rabbi Angela lives byThe radical offering of religious communities in our divided times: community, awe, proximityNavigating tokenism as the first East Asian ordained rabbi---🎙️Listen to ⁠The Sacred Podcast⁠: https://linktr.ee/sacredpodcast📖 Follow ⁠Elizabeth Oldfield: https://www.elizabetholdfield.com/💡Produced by ⁠⁠Theos Think Tank⁠⁠ in partnership with ⁠⁠Comment Magazine⁠⁠ and with support from ⁠⁠The Jerusalem Trust⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠Open Society Foundations👉 Follow Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: https://www.instagram.com/rabbibuchdahl/?hl=enOur 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👇