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…

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…