Living Out Loud

An outtake of Vicky Lunt singing a cover of 'Religious Songs' by Withered Hands

What’s it like growing up as a Jehova’s Witness, a religion that means you can’t celebrate birthdays or Christmas? Why can’t they vote or read Harry Potter? In this podcast, Vicky Lunt talks about her upbringing as a Jehova’s Witness and the gradual fading out process she is undergoing in a struggle for self-invention.

Gay Watson is a writer concerned with the dialogue between Buddhist thought, psychotherapy and the Mind Sciences. She has a PhD in Religious studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies and she trained as a psychotherapist with the Karuna Institute in Core Process, a Buddhist inspired psychotherapy. In this podcast, Gay talks about her books ‘A Philosophy of Emptiness’ and ‘Attention: Beyond Mindfulness’. "Ah, not to be cut off, not through the slightest partition shut out from the law of the stars. The inner—what is it? if not intensified sky, hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming." --- Rainer Maria Rilke

Elizabeth Oldfield is Director of the think tank Theos which exists to ‘help people move beyond common misconceptions about the place of faith and religion in society.’ She appears regularly in the media, including BBC One, Sky News, and the World Service, writing in The Financial Times and delivering Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. In this podcast, Liz talks about tribalism, polarisation and the ways in which we might do civil conversations better.

In this podcast, I interview Francis Spufford. Francis is a former Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year (1997) and has authored five highly praised books of non-fiction. His first book, 'I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination' was awarded the Writers Guild Award for Best Non-Fiction Book of 1996 and a Somerset Maugham Award. His second book 'The Child That Books Built' gave Neil Gaiman “the peculiar feeling that there was now a book I didn't need to write”. In 2007, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and his first novel, 'Golden Hill', was published in 2016 and won the Costa First Novel Award. He’s also a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths University, and for this podcast, I visited his office to speak about his deeply funny and profound 2012 book 'Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense.'