The Sacred

Can you really vote your way to a good society - or does it have to be built house by house, street by street?

Dr James Vitali - Head of Political Economy at Policy Exchange, a Sandhurst-trained army reservist, local councillor, and author of The Ownership Society: How Bourgeois Values Can Save Britain - talks about the Dorset church at the heart of his childhood, what military service taught him about sacrifice and leadership, and why he believes Britain's real crisis is moral, not economic.

In this conversation we also explored:

• Growing up between Navy deployments, and the community that stepped in
• "Servant leadership" and why politics keeps failing to practise it
• Home ownership, responsibility, and not being able to buy
• Thatcher, Tocqueville, and where conservatism lost the plot
• The human cost of localism - and what to do with the suffering in between

🎙️ Listen to The Sacred: linktr.ee/sacredpodcast
📖 Follow Elizabeth Oldfield: www.elizabetholdfield.com/
💡 The Sacred is produced by Theos Think Tank in partnership with Comment Magazine, and with support from The Jerusalem Trust and Open Society Foundations
👉 Read James' book, The Ownership Society: How Bourgeois Values Can Save Britain https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=the-ownership-society-how-bourgeois-values-can-save-britain--9781509569526
👇 Our guests and listeners to our podcast come from all kinds of perspectives and what draws us together is a desire to be self-aware about our own values and curious about other peoples. Comment your reflections below, we read them all.

Chapters:
00:00 – Intro: meeting James Vitali
01:56 – What is sacred to you?
04:13 – A rooted military childhood in Dorset
10:32 – Faith, and how it shapes his politics
15:27 – Sandhurst and learning servant leadership
18:37 – Why politics became technical instead of moral
20:43 – Thatcher's legacy and "no such thing as society"
29:24 – Almshouses and the Vale Pantry: ownership in action
32:24 – The Ownership Society: why "bourgeois values"?
37:30 – A state that isn't neutral: "statecraft is soulcraft"
44:12 – Elizabeth's own story, and why ownership matters to the soul
53:07 – Closing reflections: "biography over beliefs"

COPYRIGHT: "Video Cat Jazz" - Pär Hagström (Licensed by Epidemic Sound) & "Beyond the Veil" (feat. Khamir Music) by Simon Wester (Licensed by Musicbed).

What does it mean to prepare to die—and then discover that you need to prepare to live again?
In this conversation, poet Christian Wiman reflects on faith, poetry, love, mortality, and his experience of living for more than 20 years with cancer. 
He talks about his turbulent childhood, how poetry transformed his anger into something creative, and why he believes poems can open us to something beyond ourselves.
The conversation also explores:
Wiman’s journey from economics to poetry
What a poem actually is—and why sound can matter more than meaning
Attention and his idea of “productive inattention”
Faith, suffering, and writers including Simone Weil and Etty Hillesum

Wiman also reads three poems: Five Houses Down, 2047 Grace Street, and In the Time of Fire.
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🎙️ Listen to The Sacred: linktr.ee/sacredpodcast
📖 Follow Elizabeth Oldfield: www.elizabetholdfield.com/
💡 The Sacred is produced by Theos Think Tank in partnership with Comment Magazine, and with support from The Jerusalem Trust and Open Society Foundations
👉 See Christian Wiman's Poetry: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/christian-wiman --
👇 Our guests and listeners to our podcast come from all kinds of perspectives and what draws us together is a desire to be self-aware about our own values and curious about other peoples. Comment your reflections below, we read them all.

What are we losing by spending so much of our lives behind screens?
COVID-19 brought the whole world online, and as a podcast we kind of stayed there. This season, we made a commitment to only recording in person, mostly at Elizabeth’s community house in south London.
As a result, we sensed a big shift in our connection with guests and we thought we’d take an opportunity to reflect on a few things that we’d forgotten along the way:
Being in-person is key to meeting people as real humans and creating non-transactional relationships
Something shifts when we eat snacks together and see each other’s homes
Screens and the ease of our digital lives mean we spend less time in our bodies. It’s much more convenient — but what’s the hidden cost?
We shrink when were alone, and we trust others less

We feel challenged to spend more time with people in our bodies — looking each other in the eye, sharing physical space, and being present.
We’d love to hear whether you’ve sensed a difference in our latest in-person episodes and your thoughts on being together in person.
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🎙️Listen to The Sacred Podcast: https://linktr.ee/sacredpodcast
📖 Follow Elizabeth Oldfield: https://www.elizabetholdfield.com/
💡Produced by Theos Think Tank in partnership with Comment Magazine and with support from The Jerusalem Trust and Open Society Foundations

What do you do when you feel like an outsider?
We spoke to Rabbi Angela Buchdahl who turned her experience of being a cultural and religious outsider into a source of strength.
Raised in a biracial, mixed-faith American-Korean family, her identity was both welcomed and questioned in Korean and Jewish communities.
She later would later go on to become one of the most prominent and influential public rabbis in the United States, the first female East Asian senior rabbi at NYC's Central Synagogue, and writer of the bestselling memoir Heart of a Stranger.
We spoke about:
Owning multiple identities, not fitting in and how to create a steady sense of self
The religious conversion instinct and how to have religious humility
Key Hebrew ideas that Rabbi Angela lives by
The radical offering of religious communities in our divided times: community, awe, proximity
Navigating tokenism as the first East Asian ordained rabbi
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🎙️Listen to ⁠The Sacred Podcast⁠: https://linktr.ee/sacredpodcast
📖 Follow ⁠Elizabeth Oldfield: https://www.elizabetholdfield.com/
💡Produced by ⁠⁠Theos Think Tank⁠⁠ in partnership with ⁠⁠Comment Magazine⁠⁠ and with support from ⁠⁠The Jerusalem Trust⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠Open Society Foundations
👉 Follow Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: https://www.instagram.com/rabbibuchdahl/?hl=en

Our guests and listeners to our podcast come from all kinds of perspectives and what draws us together is a desire to be self-aware about our own values and curious about other peoples. Comment your reflections below, we read them all👇

We talk a lot about the harms and benefits of AI, but we don’t talk enough about what the conversations about AI might actually be doing to us.
Perhaps the biggest challenge in the mix may not be the technology itself, but how it changes the way we think, communicate, and relate to each other as humans.
We’re creating some space for a different kind of conversation about AI with Jamie Bartlett on 8th September in London. We’d love to see you there!
🔗 Grab a ticket here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-sacred-live-ai-and-the-future-of-being-human-tickets-1994014009580 - use code: SACRED-EARLY-BIRD for a £12 ticket! Promo ends 8.08.26