This week’s episode is a really good interview with Brian McLaren about his new book, Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart. A few things really stood out for me. I loved how he argued that constant denial is exhausting. We often think it’s the other way – all this doom and gloom is wearing me out – but McLaren argues that, in lots of cases, once we face up to the issue, once we acknowledge the reality, then actually that can be a source of energy.

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I am still working on my book on the history of Britain’s churches, a book which has taken is taking me much longer to write than I anticipated. The book is about rediscovering churches, rediscovering, in fact, the idea of sacred spaces. And one of the things I’ve experienced while working on it was how, throughout all my research and writing so far, I’ve felt like I have been treading a path walked by many others before me, albeit in very different ways.

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So, the question I posed was this: ‘Why does God get all the praise when I did all the work?’ By which I don’t mean that I necessarily need or want more praise (being English I find any praise rather embarrassing anyway. Not to mention ill-judged) but I was trying to explore the relationship between human skills, creativity and effort and the inspiration and work of the Divine. Of course all things come from God and of your own do we give you, as it says in the Prayer Book.

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Lots of stuff in this week’s episode, but it seemed to me to have a common theme of depth. We talk about reading the Bible not more widely, but more deeply – learning a passage, or simply taking one verse and dwelling on it for a long time. And following on from last week’s recap on the idea of stages of faith, we discuss how the Mid-faith Crisis could simply be motivated by a desire to go deeper, to find out more, to go beyond the superficial.

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On the podcast this week I reference T. S. Eliot's lines from Little Gidding: We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. This week I am angry at the state of the world and the state of the church, I am grieving the loss of an old friend. But poetry is comfort.

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In this week’s episode, we revisit the idea of stages of faith – which is really what this podcast is all about. The idea of Mid-faith Crisis was also behind my book The Dark Night of the Shed. During the podcast, however, we also touch on how this isn’t just a spiritual journey: you can see the stages reflected in stories, worked out in relationships and patterned in life itself.

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In our latest episode, Joe and I discuss our themes for the New Year.1 (Our New Year begins on March 25 as was the custom up until the late eighteenth century.) My theme for this year is focus. I’ve been struggling against the endless waves of distraction for a long time now, and I need to do something to arrest the slide. Moving to micro.blog was one way to avoid distractions of social media whilst still having an online presence.

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