A Poetics of Presence: Malcolm Guite on Luci Shaw

Malcolm Guite is a beloved poet, singer-songwriter, Anglican priest, and scholar whose work explores the rich interplay between faith and the arts. He studied at Cambridge and Durham, and later served as chaplain and fellow of Girton College, Cambridge. His academic interests include writers such as J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, alongside broader questions of imagination and belief. Guite is the author of a number of poetry collections, including Sounding the Seasons: Seventy Sonnets for the Christian Year, The Singing Bowl, and Love, Remember: 40 Poems of Loss, Lament and Hope, as well as books on theology and literature such as What Do Christians Believe?, Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Lifting the Veil: Imagination and the Kingdom of God—all marked by a desire to be both thoughtful and beautiful. He also performs as a musician with the band Mystery Train and regularly shares reflections on poetry, faith, and culture. To read (and hear) more, visit his website at https://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/, or watch his videos at https://www.youtube.com/@MalcolmGuitespell.
-
We often remember poets for their words. But sometimes it is their way of seeing—and of helping others to see—that leaves something just as lasting. In this conversation, Malcolm Guite reflects on his friendship with Luci Shaw, a poet whose work (quietly, and persistently) attends to the small, the ordinary, and the easily overlooked. What follows is part tribute, part theological reflection, and part invitation: to recover attention in a distracted age, to rediscover rootedness in a restless one, and to notice the ways grace so often arrives unannounced. Along the way, Guite offers stories, poems, and insights into the kind of literary friendship that doesn’t demand imitation—but instead helps another voice become more fully itself.

More

Adapting Lawhead’s Pendragon Cycle: Merlin in the Age of Streaming

In this conversation, Laura reflects on the adaptation of Stephen Lawhead’s Pendragon Cycle, a series that attempts to bring together Arthurian legend, Christian imagination, and the enduring appeal of myth. With a careful balance between appreciation and critique (not an easy task), she explores the show’s moments of beauty alongside its struggles with pacing, character, and theological coherence.

More

Bradley Jersak’s Out of the Embers: Faith After the Great Deconstruction (NCB’s Radix Live)

Across the Western Church, a seismic shift is underway. Assumptions are being questioned, inherited frameworks are cracking, and for many, faith itself feels unsettled. This moment has come to be known—sometimes anxiously, sometimes triumphantly—as “deconstruction.” But what if deconstruction is neither a collapse nor a cure-all? What if it is, instead, a threshold?

In this Radix Live conversation, Jersak reflects on his book Out of the Embers: Faith After the Great Deconstruction, exploring what faith might look like after cherished certainties are shaken—but not abandoned. Drawing from memoir, theology, philosophy, and the Christian tradition, Jersak invites us to consider how deconstruction, when approached wisely and communally, can actually become a pathway toward deeper communion with God rather than an exit from faith.

Rather than rushing to rescue belief or cheer its dismantling, Jersak patiently “deconstructs deconstruction” itself. He engages voices from across time—from Moses and Paul to Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and Simone Weil—showing that this unsettling process is not new, nor is it faithless. Because, when approached with humility, deconstruction can strip away counterfeits, expose idols—progressive and conservative alike—and return us to the living Christ who meets us in the ashes.

This conversation explores what deconstruction actually is, why critique of the Church is necessary, and why thoughtful deconstruction does not have to lead to deconversion. Special attention is given to the vital role of community, the dangers of isolation, and the temptation toward new fundamentalisms once old ones fall away.

More

Living in the Book of Common Prayer, with Julie Lane-Gay

In a world governed by speed, productivity, and distraction, many Christians (us!) long for something steadier—a way of prayer that can hold the whole of life. We rush to work, share coffee with friends, collapse into bed at day’s end, and hope, somehow, to sense God’s presence in it all. Yet prayer can often feel elusive, as though God were distant rather than near.

In this live conversation, Julie Lane-Gay reflected on her award-winning book The Riches of Your Grace: Living in the Book of Common Prayer and invited us into a deeper way of inhabiting time, prayer, and grace through the Book of Common Prayer. Rather than offering a history or technical guide, Lane-Gay shared how the Prayer Book quietly forms us—shaping our hearts, ordering our days, and anchoring ordinary Christian life in Christ.

Drawing on personal stories, insight, and lived practice (which she writes about ever so beautifully), Julie explored how liturgical prayer resists cultural hurry, re-forms our desires, and roots us in God’s larger story. Along the way, the conversation touched on formation, community, catechesis, the church calendar, and why praying with the Church—across time and place—mattered now more than ever. Hosted by Radix editor Matthew Steem, this event featured Julie Lane-Gay in conversation about a way of prayer that was slow, communal, and profoundly hopeful.

More

The Light from a Thousand Wounds: Corey Hatfield on Autism, Suffering, and Beauty.

Corey Hatfield was born and raised in Colorado. She and her college sweetheart, Arin, have been married for twenty-five years and are the proud parents of five grown children, one of whom is autistic. Through many turbulent, overwhelming years of parenting, Corey encountered beauty to be the great healer of trauma and now feels passionate about sharing her journey with fellow strugglers. Rather than viewing suffering as a curse, she believes it to be a gift, capable of opening humanity to deeper levels of healing and growth. She and her husband now live on eighty peaceful acres in the Wet Mountains of southwestern Colorado. She also has just recently released her book The Light from a Thousand Wounds: A Mother's Memoir of Finding Beauty in Life's Darkest Moments—a read we’d highly recommend! You can learn more about Corey at www.coreyhatfield.com

When Corey Hatfield describes parenting her son Grayson, she jokes that she could use a bumper sticker: “All I really needed to know in life, I learned from autism.” Behind the humor is a story marked by screaming nights, medical misdiagnoses, shattered assumptions—and an unexpected encounter with beauty. In this conversation, Corey, an Orthodox Christian, writer, and mother of five, reflects on raising an autistic son, walking through a traumatic brain injury with another child, and finding a theology of suffering that helped in providing real and lasting healing. Along the way, she invites churches to trade projects for relationships, solutions for presence, and easy answers for genuine compassion. Ultimately, her story offers not a set of tips for “fixing” autism, but a deeper way of seeing God, ourselves, and one another.

More
1 2 3 … 8