Every day is freighted with baffling questions, about pain and love, about joy and purpose. Hold On, Let Go is a small collection of field notes for those days when we feel a little more lost than usual. Lovely and cruel. Simple and difficult. Extraordinary and quotidian. Sometimes on the…

‘Fifty, A Festival Lexicon’, a limited edition volume marking fifty years of The Greenbelt Arts Festival, is a book of clues for those trying to keep faith today. Making it. The artist. Everyone with that original instinct. All of us. That first urge. To take the form and the void…

On how music heals us and the melody of community. For BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, guest edited by The Dunbartonshire Concert Band. Tomorrow morning there’s a good chance more people in England will be singing outside church than inside. They won’t be singing Amazing Grace but Sweet Caroline or…

For BBC Radio 4 on Paul Simon’s new album and how ‘religion may be at its most powerful when it’s hiding in song or poem or psalm.’ ‘The Lord is my record producer…’ sings Paul Simon, on his new album Seven Psalms. ‘The Lord is the music I hear… deep…

For BBC Radio 4 on Earth Day, how Julian of Norwich saw everything in a hazelnut and love drives change. There are two alarms going off this weekend — one we will notice, the other we may continue to doze through. The one we notice will go off on most…

A friendly letter to the owner of JD Wetherspoons who is about to call Last Orders on our local north London pub, The Coronet. Dear Tim, We don’t know each other and we’ve never met, but I visit your house twice a week. This is the public house known as…

For BBC Radio 4 on the silent witness of trees and life’s gradual, halting revelations. Over Christmas we made our regular family pilgrimage along London’s Regents Canal to the ancient grounds of Old St Pancras Church, near Kings Cross. To our dismay we discovered that The Hardy Tree has fallen. …

Nick Cave inspiring this thought for BBC Radio 4 on ritual and spirituality in the circular economy of faith. What’s the most spiritual book published in 2022? There’s a good argument for saying it’s a series of conversations about life and death, art and creativity between the journalist Sean O’Hagan…

Sport as a sideways glance at the numinous. (A BBC R4 Thought For The Day.) On Thursday evening, as I’ve done for the past 25 years, I met up with a bunch of friends for our weekly football match. It was cold, the floodlit pitch was slippery and the leaves…