The Church Times Podcast

The Symposium continues this week with a talk by the Bishop of Chelmsford, Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani, and a response by the church historian the Revd Dr Jeremy Morris.

The talks were given last month at the event “Public faith, common good, Christian social order,” organised by St John’s College, Cambridge, in conjunction with the diocese of Ely and the Church Times.

Read more about the Symposium here

Dr Francis-Dehquani’s books include:

(SPCK, 2025). Read our review here
Cries for a Lost Homeland: Reflections on Jesus’ sayings from the cross (Canterbury Press, 2021). Read an extract here
Dr Morris’s books include:

A People’s Church: A history of the Church of England (Profile Books, 2023). Read our review here
To Build Christ’s Kingdom: An F. D. Maurice Reader (Canterbury Press, 2007)

Click the play button above to listen to this podcast. You can also listen to the Church Times Podcast on the Church Times app for iPhone and iPad, SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and most other podcast platforms. Music for the podcast is by Twisterium.

Picture credit: Diocese of Chelmsford

Try 10 issues of the Church Times for £10 or get two months access to our website and apps, also for £10. Go to www.churchtimes.co.uk/new-reader

Our new four-part series, The Symposium, continues this week with a talk by Dr Nick Spencer, senior fellow of Theos, and a response by the former Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams.

The talks were given last month at the event “Public faith, common good, Christian social order,”, organised by St John’s College, Cambridge, in conjunction with the diocese of Ely and the Church Times.

Other speakers at the event, whose talks will appear on the podcast in the coming weeks, include:

Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani, Bishop of Chelmsford

The Revd Dr Jeremy Morris, church historian, former national C of E adviser on ecumenical relations and former Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge.

The Bishop of Edmonton, Dr Anderson Jeremiah, a globally recognised theologian

Dr Anna Rowlands, St Hilda Associate Professor of Catholic Social Thought & Practice in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University

Read more about the Symposium here: https://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/about-us/news-and-research/leading-thinkers-discuss-faith-in-a-fractured-society

Dr Spencer hosts the podcast Reading our Times. His books include:

The Landscapes of Science and Religion: What are we disagreeing about?, written with Hannah Waite (OUP, 2025).
Magisteria: The entangled histories of science and religion (Oneworld, 2023).
The Evolution of the West: How Christianity has shaped our values (SPCK, 2016)

Dr Williams’s books include:

Solidarity: The work of recognition (Bloomsbury, 2026).
Do We Have the Right to Die? , written with Brenda Hale (Vintage, 2026).
Discovering Christianity: A guide for the curious (SPCK, 2025).

Music for the podcast is by Twisterium.

Try 10 issues of the Church Times for £10 or get two months access to our website and apps, also for £10. Go to www.churchtimes.co.uk/new-reader

A new series, The Symposium, begins this week, with a talk by the Bishop of St Albans, Dr Andrew Rumsey.

The talk was given last month at the event “Public faith, common good, Christian social order,” and was organised by St John’s College, Cambridge, in conjunction with the diocese of Ely and the Church Times.

Other speakers at the event, whose talks will appear on the podcast in the coming weeks, include:

Dr Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury
Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani, Bishop of Chelmsford
Dr Nick Spencer, senior fellow at the think tank Theos
Dr Anna Rowlands, St Hilda Associate Professor of Catholic Social Thought & Practice in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University

Read more about the Symposium here: https://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/about-us/news-and-research/leading-thinkers-discuss-faith-in-a-fractured-society

Dr Rumsey’s books include:

Parish: An Anglican theology of place (SCM Press)
English Grounds: A pastoral journal (SCM Press)

Music for the podcast is by Twisterium.

Try 10 issues of the Church Times for £10 or get two months access to our website and apps, also for £10. Go to www.churchtimes.co.uk/new-reader

Tributes have been paid to the journalist and broadcaster Edward Stourton, who died this month, aged 68.

Paul Vallely writes in the Church Times this week: “Ed’s faith strengthened his journalism because it gave him a deeper insight into the truth. There is no finer exemplar of the vocation of journalism than Edward Stourton.”

Last year, Edward Stourton delivered the Sir Tony Baldry Lecture in Winchester Cathedral as part of the Church Times Festival of Faith and Literature. The lecture examined how truth can survive in a digital age, and explained why truth-telling still matters.

“Technology can create challenges as well as opportunities,” he said. “Today’s digital landscape offers us an abundance — a superabundance — of sources for information, something unimaginable in the 1940s, and, indeed, in the three-television-channel world I joined in the 1970s. If we’re offered several versions of the truth, it is only natural to prefer the version which best fits our views and prejudices, and that’s a real challenge facing us in what’s sometimes called the mainstream media. So, how do we meet that challenge?”

Read Paul Vallely's article here: https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2026/31-july/comment/columnists/paul-vallely-for-edward-stourton-journalism-was-a-vocation

Try 10 issues of the Church Times for £10 or get two months access to our website and apps, also for £10. Go to www.churchtimes.co.uk/new-reader

On the podcast this week, the Archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels and Primate of Belgium, Mgr Luc Terlinden, is interviewed by James Macintyre, staff writer for the Church Times.

The interview was recorded on Sunday in a chapel at York Minster. Archbishop Terlinden had been invited by the Archbishop of York to be an ecumenical observer at the meeting of the General Synod in York, after he had invited Archbishop Cottrell, to Mechelen, to a major international conference last year.

Archbishop Terlinden speaks about his impressions of the Synod, what the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches can learn from one another, his hopes for world peace, and his assessment of Pope Leo XIV’s first year.

Music for the podcast is by Twisterium.

Try 10 issues of the Church Times for £10 or get two months access to our website and apps, also for £10. Go to www.churchtimes.co.uk/new-reader