I know of no better method for guaranteeing a personal revelation than walking a pilgrimage. Even a short one of an hour or two will do. It must be why they’re booming as a spiritual practice. “Bring your own beliefs”…

Aristotle called three a perfect number. We offer three cheers of praise. Christians envisage God as triune. In this new episode of The Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and I ask why three is associated with completion, creativity, dynamism and divinity.…

You can now listen to the introduction to A Secret History of Christianity: Jesus, the Last Inkling and the Evolution of Consciousness on youtube or audio. Do consider buying it as an audiobook!

This is a talk I gave at WPF Therapy on how Owen Barfield’s ideas about the evolution of consciousness might help shape psychotherapy’s sense of itself. The youtube shows the core part; the audio is the full talk including my…

Excerpts from my essay on trance states and the origins of religion in human evolution published at Aeon. Dunbar believes that a few hundred thousand years ago, archaic humans took a step that ramped up this capacity. They started deliberately…

The artefacts of ancient Egypt fascinate because they touch a half forgotten experience of being in the world. Hieroglyphs do something similar. As Tutankhamun comes to London, what participation with life do they convey? Susan Brind Morrow, a translator of…

Socrates was at the start of a revolution in the perception of death. It had been experienced as a return to the ancestors. It became the way to discover the life beyond this life. This is an edited extract from…

This article was published in The Tablet. I was once in a discussion about mission. We were a sub-committee, mulling over what we should do to spread the gospel and boost church numbers. An hour passed, as did various moods,…

Part 1 Part 2 I was delighted to get the chance to range over a wide variety of key questions put by Michael Leighty, gathered from an online audience, to reflect on the relevance and thought of the Inkling, Owen…

I hugely enjoyed this further conversation with Paul VanderKlay about Owen Barfield and modern Christianity. It ranged over the meaning of parables and the reality of miracles, the eyes that can see today and the ears that can detect what’s…