Show Notes
Hugo Rifkind has spent his career observing power. He also grew up inside it — and never quite felt he belonged there. In this episode, he talks about: The Scottish boarding school where violence was a point of pride... until a public inquiry forced the question About being Jewish in public life since October 7th, and what it felt like when the people his community relied on weren't there The thing he values most — connection — and his honest admission that what he often really means is something more one-sided than that
🎙️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 Hugo Rifkind: https://www.instagram.com/p/DXmPHlqo1Jf/?hl=en-gb
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What happens when the AI tools we used to make life easier started to change the way we think? Journalist and author Jamie Bartlett joins Elizabeth Oldfield for a live recording to explore what AI reveals about human nature, why we keep using tools we’re worried about, and what we risk losing when we let machines do our thinking for us. We talk about: • How using AI has affected Jamie’s own writing and thinking • Why language models can be so good at flattering us and exploiting our own biases • What it means to remain thoughtful and human in an age of increasingly capable machines • How we can learn to ask better questions - not just of AI, but of ourselves Jamie Bartlett is a journalist and author whose work explores the social and political consequences of technology. His books include How to Talk to AI, The People vs. Tech and Radicals. Thank you to everyone who joined us in the room and to those who sent us their thoughts on AI ahead of the evening. 🎙️ 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 Jamie's latest book, How to Talk to AI: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/475950/how-to-talk-to-ai-by-bartlett-jamie/9780753561980 👇 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. Copyright: "Make You Mine - Instrumental" by Brooke Annibale Licensed by The Musicbed LLC"Beyond the Veil (feat. Khamir Music)" by Simon Wester Licensed by The Musicbed LLC
What Does It Take to Create a Shared Home in a Divided City? In Jerusalem, two women from opposite sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide, Riman Barakat and Karen Brunwasser, have spent more than a decade building FeelBeit, a shared arts and cultural space where Israeli and Palestinian artists and communities are invited to ‘feel at home’ together. In this moving conversation, recorded live at Aspen Ideas Festival, we explore what it takes to build trust across a profound divide—and what happens when that trust is tested by violence, grief and fear. We also cover: Friendship and why relationships can be a form of peacebuilding What happened at FeelBeit after October 7 and in the years since The power of art to hold grief, anger, joy and hope at the same time Why “compassion over righteous indignation” and “self-love and self-critique” might be some of the hardest—and most necessary—practices for our societies
Can you really vote your way to a good society - or does it have to be built house by house, street by street?
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
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