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…

A British Citizenship ceremony with a Syrian refugee family inspired this Thought For The Day for BBC R4. I’m sitting with Hussein, who’s 12 years old, when he turns to his father Mohamed with a sudden insight. ‘Now that we’re British,’ he says, ‘We will have to eat British food.’ …

Retrofitting the way we think: a Thought For The Day inspired by Hildegard of Bingen. Autumn is bedding in and hot sunny days are becoming a vague memory. Next week the clocks go back and summer is officially history. This Monday would normally mark the annual Festival of Turning The…

Poems to bear witness to the beguiling baffle of all these lovely days. In the Venn diagram where the circles of poetry and prayer overlap, there’s a sweet spot. An overlooked place where a found poem finds that at any moment the numinous is hiding in plain sight. It’s where…

On the unspoken ritual of drinking tea. It’s official. Drinking tea prolongs our lives. A study published this week by the Annals of Medicine finds that drinking two or more cups of tea every day reduces mortality by up to 13%. Better still, this is regardless of whether we add…

On the divine hiding in plain sight. The rubber gloves. The bog brush. The tangle of matted hair and gunk when you lift up the drain lid in the shower. Emptying the bins. Dragging a recalcitrant hoover around yet another room. I spent last summer volunteering in a small community…

On the disappearance of cash and what money can, and cannot, measure. Standing in a slow-moving supermarket queue this week, everyone was getting a little impatient. The customer being served was having trouble paying for her shopping. Very slowly she was drawing from her purse round bits of metal and…

When there’s no substitute for the body language of presence. I travelled back in time last week. A friend texted from New York and asked me to send best wishes to another friend — let’s call him Jack. The text landed on me like a punch because Jack died last…