Parish news
Update on The Sacred, March speaking events and some things I am enjoying
The Sacred Substack
As well as writing here I host a podcast called The Sacred. I work on it with an amazing team, based out of Theos, and we have decided to publish The Sacred also on Substack. If you’ve never listened, it is where you will hopefully find:
a different kind of conversation - one that doesn’t fuel the algorithm’s appetite for outrage, but our deeper hunger for understanding. The Sacred has become a refuge for the curious: those willing to sit with discomfort, to listen beyond their tribe, and to discover the often hidden values that drive people across the ideological spectrum.
This isn’t more content that confirms your preexisting opinions or comforts you with other people’s idiocy. Its deep-dive profile meets spiritual inquiry - thoughtful, unhurried conversations with people whose perspectives might challenge you, surprise you, or remind you that we often have more in common than we suppose. From poets to politicians, activists to academics, entrepreneurs to influencers, each guest is invited to explore the formative beliefs and experiences that have shaped who they are and surface what drives them to live the lives they’ve chosen.
But these conversations aren’t just windows into other lives - they’re mirrors for your own. As you listen to what drives others, you’ll find yourself asking: what do I hold sacred? What has shaped me? Where do my deepest values clash with the world around me? The Sacred creates room not just for understanding others, but for the quiet, necessary work of understanding ourselves. Spaces like this help us live more intentionally, in ways more aligned with the kind of people we want to be becoming, and in a noisy information environment they are increasingly rare. Most media content is designed to make us react - with fear, anger, self-righteousness, insecurity or just the urge to buy something. The Sacred is designed instead to help us reflect - on our own values, our own prejudices, our own tribalism - and in so doing to be becoming more the kind of people the world needs in this moment.
You may already be listening/watching already on other platforms but it strikes me that the sensibility of this place is a pretty good match for what we are trying to do. You’ll find full episode transcripts making it easier to capture quotes (and share them) and an active invitation to respond in the comments. If you’ve ever thought after an episode “I wish I could talk that through with someone”, this is the place. I hope you’ll subscribe and recommend!
This week’s episode is with titan of the UK media, Stig Abel:
New essay on communitarian feminism
I recently published an essay for US based family policy think tank Capita called Towards a Feminism of Interdependence. It was a real wrestle to articulate what my increasing fundamentalist communitarianism might mean for feminism. I was, I’ll admit, somewhat braced, because speaking of sex and gender and what we owe each other can’t help but elicit strong reactions. I was grateful that via The Sacred I had engaged with Leah Libresco Sargeant (whose episode is upcoming) and also with Sophie Lewis - two thinkers often assumed to be photo negatives who share an obsession with care. This is the summary of where I landed:
What would it mean to build a feminism not around the freedom of the individual, but around our irreducible need for each other? I live in a household of eight people—and it was loneliness, not liberation, that brought us together. Starting from that experience, I want to argue that both dominant strands of feminism—the ‘liberal’ drive to free women from care, and the ‘conservative’ insistence that care is women’s defining vocation—fail us in the same fundamental way. They cannot hold the truth of multiple things at once. Care is not a trap, nor is it a destiny. It is the connective tissue of a common life. What we need—whether we are men, women or people who struggle with those labels—is not to shrug off our interdependence, but to create better ways of being entangled with each other—a feminism grounded, as bell hooks puts it, in the practice of love.
Events
I’m speaking in a few places this month:
On 12th March I’ll be back at the UnHerd Club for a ‘debate’ (I’ve been assured it won’t be a formal Oxford Union style debate because that is not my jam) on ‘This House Regrets the Reformation’.
On Saturday 28th March I’ll be an Oxford Literary Festival with the lovely Oliver Burkeman discussing ‘Living Life to the Full’
Things I’ve enjoyed recently
The essay Doomers in Love by Mana Afsari in The Point is just wonderful and wise and wistful and worth your time (you know she’s a good writer cos she doesn’t alliterate like that).
I harvested and force fed our homegrown spinach to our community house last week and then went down an internet rabbit hole on the phenomenon of “spinach teeth”. Yes, there is a war happening but at least I know all about the mysterious phenomenon caused (scientists think) by spiky calcium oxalate crystals. No, adding dairy will not help. For once, Nigel Slater is wrong.
It has finally stopped raining long enough to go rollerblading again.
The Lost Words Blessing from this album by Spell Songs is profoundly beautiful and stops me in my tracks every time I hear it.
Incredible song; thanks for sharing it. 🙏🏼🖤