Last week I got the chance to interview the Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, for my research on spiritual ecstasy. It was an informal conversation, and it was very kind of the Bishop to give me the benefit of his time and wisdom. I thought he'd be a good interviewee because of his interest in contemplative practices and in Christian mystics like Thomas Traherne. And he was!
Read MoreLast week, a reader called Tom wrote in with this story:
Read MoreDear Jules, I have been going through a really rough time lately and it is quite similar to your experience. I was quite a happy go lucky person through life until I had a bad terrifying trip on weed (my first time trying) I took way too much and freaked out and that traumatised me - having very anxious scary thoughts like what if I harm my self, what if I harm others - what is the meaning of life and whats the point of it all.
Read MoreI'm doing a Philosophy for Life workshop for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, which will be interpreted in sign language. It's happening next Monday, July 14, at 7pm, in the upstairs room of the Wheatsheaf pub on Rathbone Place.
Read MoreI had Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from 1995 until 2001. Seven years of fear, anxiety, depression and paranoia, which I feared would last forever. But I got better, thanks to a near-death experience.
Read More100 years ago this year, James Joyce published Dubliners, his first book, in which he explored the lives of characters through what he called ‘epiphanies’. He’d been experimenting with epiphanies for some years, and even started to write a ‘book of epiphanies’, which he intended - with customary modesty - to send to every library in the world. You can read some of them here.
Read MoreToday I'm going to a seminar at Queen Mary, University of London, on music and well-being. It's one of the best things about being a sort-of-academic - you get to hang out for a day with experts in a field. Today, that includes Roger Scruton, who is the British philosopher I most respect, although I have a love-hate relationship with his work.
Read MoreThis year I’ve developed and trialled an eight-part course in practical philosophy, called Philosophies for Life. The pilot was financed by the Arts and Humanities Research Council via Queen Mary, University of London. I trialled the course with three partner organizations: Saracens rugby club; New College Lanarkshire and HMP Low Moss prison; and Manor Gardens mental health charity.
Read MoreThis week, I met Nataline Daycreator, a wonderful coach and author who works to help victims of spiritual abuse. She is herself a survivor of 14 years in an abusive Pentecostal community. She told me her story and the lessons we can draw from it.
Read MoreIt's been a busy couple of weeks, hence no newsletter last week. I feel like I am spinning plates at the moment. Luckily I'm off to Cornwall tomorrow to take it easy with some good friends. In the meantime, here are three insights I have taken from this weekend's wild adventure.
Read MoreJane Davis says that literature saved her life. She grew up in a broken home, with a single mum who died of alcoholism. She left home and lived in squats, with a husband who also eventually died of substance abuse.
Read MoreProfessor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is one of the world's best-known psychologists, famous for developing the concept of 'flow'. Inspired by the creative process of artists and musicians, Csikszentmihalyi spent decades researching the 'flow' states of consciousness that people can achieve when they're totally absorbed in doing what they're best at.
Read MoreAs you know, I’ve been researching altered states of consciousness for the last year and a half, for my next book. As part of that, I started going to various churches around London, including a big charismatic-Anglican church in South Kensington called HTB.
Read MoreI was watching Rev the other day. It’s a sitcom about a beleaguered inner-city priest, played by Tom Hollander. This series, Rev has been facing all kinds of trials. In the Easter episode, things get really bad. Adam’s reputation is rock-bottom, his church is facing closure, and he finds himself on a hill overlooking London, where he meets God in the form of a tramp, played by Liam Neeson. It’s a lovely moment (sorry for the crap picture quality):
Read MoreI write this from York, where yesterday I went to the ‘Story of Chocolate’ museum, and was shown around by a delightful and learned historian, Alex Hutchinson, who is the world expert on the Rowntree family and thus able to tell me some fascinating family gossip.
Read MoreMy great-great-great grandfather, a York Quaker called Henry Isaac Rowntree (that's him on the left), set up Rowntree's chocolate company in York in 1862. He was an amiable young man, 'perhaps the only Rowntree with a sense of humour' according to one historian.
Read MoreI went to the book-launch of a new book on well-being policy yesterday, which brought together some leading figures in this nascent movement - including David Halpern of the government’s ‘nudge unit’, Canadian economist John Helliwell, psychologist Maurren O'Hara, and Juliet Michaelson of the new economics foundation.
Read MoreDo you want to make a living practicing philosophy beyond academia, but not sure how? I'm organizing a seminar on practical philosophy on the evening of May 22 in London, bringing together people practicing philosophy in the community, in adult education, in companies, in prisons, in schools and in the NHS.
Read MoreYesterday I finished a pilot course in practical philosophy at Low Moss prison. It’s an eight-session course that introduces people to the ideas and life-philosophies of various ancient philosophers, including Socrates, the Stoics, Plato, Rumi, the Buddha, Jesus and Lao Tzu. I've been running it in partnership with New College Lanarkshire, which runs the learning courses in west Scottish prisons.
Read MoreI've been reading a very unusual book about sport, a classic really, called The Inner Game of Tennis, written by Tim Gallwey and published in 1974. I picked it up at a free bookstore in Holland. Two tennis players had recommended it to me as one of the few good books on tennis out there. What I didn't expect was it would be such a wise book about spirituality.
Read MoreI attended a seminar on wonder at the Centre for Medical Humanities in Durham last week. This post comes from our discussions there. Thanks to all the participants and to Martyn Evans for a great day.
Read MoreApologies for the lack of newsletters recently - I’ve been in the depths of a project to design and teach a course based on Philosophy for Life. This month, I started teaching it in three organizations - a mental health charity in London called Manor Gardens; Saracens rugby club; and Low Moss prison in Glasgow (via New College Lanarkshire, which runs learning courses there).
Read MoreTrue Detective has an unusual amount of theology for a cop show. The hero, Rustin Cohle, is a fervent atheist, who delivers soliloquies on the meaninglessness of existence as he and his partner drive to the next crime scene. Human consciousness is an ‘evolutionary misstep’, humans are ‘biological puppets’, religion is a consoling ‘fairy tale’ for morons.
Read MoreI'm doing a very brief talk this evening exploring the relationship between Christianity, Stoicism and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. This essay 'unpacks' the ideas I'll speed through this evening.
Read MoreExcited to be launching the Philosophy for Life course this week - tomorrow at Manor Gardens, a mental health charity in North London; then on Thursday at Saracens rugby club; then on Friday at Low Moss prison. I've been having fun making some material for the course today, including this poster and a 'Deidre's Photo Casebook'-style montage called 'Socrates' Case-Book'. I'm hoping to launch the course for other companies and organizations later this year.
Read MoreWhen I was six, my best friend Joe and I could give ourselves head-rushes by contemplating the size of the universe. We let our imaginations rise from the Earth, to the Solar System, to the Milky Way, and then stretched our imaginations as far as they would go to comprehend the universe. Then we’d wonder what was beyond that, and for a second we’d feel a sort of dizziness at the mystery in which we found ourselves.
Read MoreYesterday I interviewed Simon Nelson, CEO of FutureLearn, which is the new UK platform for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The interview is for a New Statesman piece I'm writing on adult education, but it was so interesting I thought it'd be useful to publish the whole thing here. How can academics get their research turned into a MOOC, and potentially reach a huge global audience? Turns out you only need £10K or so.
Read MoreLast Sunday I was on my way to Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB) for their 7pm service. On the way, I went into a second-hand book store on Kensington Church Street. I picked out a book called The Revelations, thinking it was about spiritual experiences. It turned out to be a novel about someone who lives on Ken Church Street, who goes to a church based on HTB, which turns out to be a sinister cult. So I bought it and read it.
Read MoreThis year I got some funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to teach a course in practical philosophy with three partner organizations - Manor Gardens, a mental health charity in North London; Low Moss prison in Glasgow; and Saracens rugby club.
Read MoreA few months back I was giving a philosophy workshop in a mental health charity. It was one of my less popular events - only one person turned up, a Romanian man who had recently moved to the UK and was finding it tough. We talked about Socratic philosophy, about the idea of engaging your inner voice in a rational dialogue, and the man (let’s call him Anghel) quietly told me that he heard voices.
Read MoreI like this Vice documentary about the Ministry of Drunken Glory, an ecstatic Christian movement in Minnesota.
Read MoreImagine if the Nazi regime was still in power - perhaps with the leadership changed, perhaps slightly less murderous and more pragmatic - but with no reconciliation or recognition of former crimes. Imagine if the Holocaust was celebrated, with aging veterans of Auschwitz wheeled out for public adulation, to show their medals and tell stories of the killings.
Read MoreHow do you fit experiences of ecstasy, awe, wonder, the Sublime, or the Numinous into a materialist paradigm, without reducing or devaluing such experiences? With difficulty.
Read MoreI was up in east Scotland on New Year's Day, and found myself walking along a path called the John Muir Way. A few days later, a book I was reading mentioned a famous naturalist called John Muir, so I looked him up. It turns out John Muir was a father of modern conservationism, and the founder of many of California’s national parks. He is also a perfect specimen for my research into ecstatic experiences in nature.
Read MoreOne of the things that has happened in our culture over the last 300 years is the shift from theology to morality to psychiatry. Conditions that were once deemed vices are now considered diseases. Gluttony has become obesity. Despair has become depression. Lust has become sex addiction.
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