Thought for the Day

BBC Radio 4
  • 4.6 (55)
  • Religion & Spirituality
  • Updated Daily

Reflections from a faith perspective on issues and people in the news.

  1. 19h ago

    Michael Hurley

    24 AUG 26

  2. 2d ago

    Reverend Roy Jenkins

    At last, a few showers. They’ve never been more welcome in this strange, uncomfortable, record-breaking summer. Day after day of sunshine, held fitfully at bay by air conditioning on overtime, cooling drinks, and the drawn curtains which to an earlier generation would have signalled a community in mourning. Today they might be reminding us of lost gardens, parched lawns, and blazing hillsides, threatening some homes directly, and sending a choking warning over great distances. At the same time, the heat has taken a grim toll among people seeking to cool off in rivers, lakes and at the seaside - this week a couple and their 14-year-old daughter in the sea off Shoreham, in Sussex. Understandably there’s been a huge outpouring of sympathy. The emergency response included coastguards, lifeboat and ambulance services and police, and I think it’s good to pause occasionally to honour men and women who give themselves to rescue services of all kinds. Leading the battle against the wildfires across the country, of course, have been firefighters. We marvel at their willingness to get up close, putting their own lives in jeopardy. How they must sweat before those flames, wearing their heavy protective gear, as conscious of the risk they’re taking as the volunteers crewing a lifeboat in a stormy sea. And how their families must share the anxiety. I believe the would-be rescuers reflect something of the character of a God who is also in the business of rescue – often getting people out of scrapes of their own making. It was while we were still helpless, powerless, says St.Paul, that Jesus Christ died for us. There’s regular debate about how we should treat people in difficulties because of what they’ve consumed, knowing it could harm them. Within the rescue services, I suspect there’s occasional irritation, anger maybe, at those who put themselves at risk needlessly…sailing the channel in bathtubs, attempting to scale serious peaks wearing flip flops. But those who’ve trained for this mission still do it, because they might be the only hope. On a glorious sunny day sixty years ago, I ventured into the sea from a popular beach in Jersey, with big waves and wonderful surf. Hardly a swimmer at all, I was soon in trouble. Currents I knew nothing of sucked me under, and no matter how I fought, I was helpless. I really thought I would drown….before I was fished out by a team of lifesavers, feeling shaken, foolish and very grateful, one of a dozen rescued that day. It’s not how I usually put it, but I understand why some people finding faith in Jesus talk of being saved. I’ve been rescued, and I’m glad today’s rescue services remind me.

  3. 3d ago

    Dr Krish Kandiah

    21 AUG 26

  4. 4d ago

    The Reverend Lucy Winkett

    20 AUG 26

  5. 5d ago

    Mona Siddiqui

    What does it mean to erase a woman? You don't have to kill her. You can simply make her invisible. Tell her she can’t get a higher education, she can’t work freely, tell her where she can go, who she can speak to, and how loudly she can speak. Eventually, you don't need to silence her because her absence has been made normal. Five years after the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan, women and girls have told the BBC their lives are unrecognisable under the rule of the regime. The Taliban's foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, was asked by the BBC about education for girls in Afghanistan, to which he replied that "it is not correct to say everything is banned for women", "Women are not totally restricted on all walks of life... Only one small part (of their affairs) is restricted until further notice." And while there is some disagreement within the Taliban as well as condemnation from many Muslim voices and organisations, those who rule say they are doing this in the name of Islam. But a government that needs to control the movement, clothing, education and voice of women in the name of morality, a morality that requires women to disappear isn’t showing strength; it’s showing fear dressed as piety. Because often across all faiths, religious authority which says `We know what God wants’ always conveniently discovers that what God wants looks remarkably like what we want. And that’s why gradually the word woman is ignored from the Qur’anic verses which speak of the moral agency of “the believing men and believing women, the devout men and devout women, the truthful men and truthful women.” Today the women of Afghanistan have become a political and theological test. But perhaps the most dangerous thing is the possibility that the world will eventually become accustomed to it. Because oppression has a final victory. Not when people are silenced, but when their silence no longer disturbs us. And yet despite all of this, many women tell the BBC, `One day, everything will change... but we must continue with patience, and we will not lose hope." A government can close a school, it can close a university, it can close a woman's workplace but it can’t destroy the future she imagines.’ In the words of the Afghan poet, Nadia Anjuman, who wrote in her poem `My Garden’: `I will trust the meaning of hope, I will shut the door on grief and find another path.’

  6. 6d ago

    The Rev Dr Michael Spence

    Good morning. I have spent about half my life in England and half in Australia. Watching the television news over the past few weeks has been somewhat confusing. I think of England as a place where nature is more or less under control, a ‘green and pleasant land’, mild in climate, with a landscape shaped by generations of human hands. Raging wildfires, the terrifying unpredictability of nature out of control, railway engineering disrupted by scorching heat, that seems part of a different place. That reminds me of my childhood, driving through areas destroyed by bushfire, areas in which, as the poet Judith Wright put it , “Charred death upon the rock leans his charred bone and stares at death from sockets black with flame.” Reflecting on nature ‘under control’ as opposed to ‘out of control’, I wonder if this notion of ‘control’ isn’t exactly where the problem lies. At least since the industrial revolution, we have tended to see the natural world as brute matter for moulding to our will, as so much ‘stuff’ to be exploited, to be consumed. That approach has brought progress, but also the damage to our planet and the climate change from which we now suffer. Our thirst for ‘control’ has led us to a place where many young people, faced with an ecological crisis, feel more ‘out of control’ than ever before. The bewitching vision of the writer of the book of Genesis is so very different. In the garden story, the relationship between the human and the natural world is not one of ‘control’ but of ‘authority’, of rule with a delegated responsibility for the natural world. Nature in this tradition is both an essentially good gift, and one damaged by rebellion against its giver, the Creator. It is therefore to be treasured, but not to be worshipped, nor even simply affirmed. So, we are right to be grateful for fire when it warms, and to be repelled by it when it kills. The human responsibility is not to ‘control’ nature but to tend it as one tends a garden, to work with it when we can, and to work for its healing when we can’t. In this vein, for example, science has recently affirmed the wisdom of ancient Aboriginal Australian practices of fire management, practices that by contained burning, by working with, rather than against ‘country’, limit the occurrence of more devastating fire. Had we listened more carefully to the Genesis story over the last two hundred and fifty years, and less to the logic of consumption and control, we might now be in a better place ecologically. Reflecting on the story at this point, may just give our planet a chance.

  7. Aug 17

    Bishop James Jones

    17 AUG 26

  8. Aug 15

    Catherine Pepinster

    TODAY, AUGUST 15, is traditionally the day that Catholics celebrate the feast of the Assumption, that marks Mary, mother of Jesus, being taken both body and soul into heaven. Countless Catholics even before the Church made it official dogma, believed it. What intrigues me, though, is when the Church did make the Assumption dogma. It was confirmed by Pope Pius XII in 1950. So just five years after the end of the Second World War, when millions of Jewish people lost their lives in the Holocaust, the Catholic Church officially endorsed a Jewish woman as Queen of Heaven. There’s still controversy about Pius XII, elected Pope in 1939. Some historians argue that he didn’t do enough for the Jewish people, while others say he worked behind the scenes to help save Jews from the Nazis. Before he became Pope, as Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the Vatican Secretary of State, he signed on behalf of his predecessor, Pius XI, the 1933 concordat that guaranteed the rights of the Catholic Church to operate in Germany. What is less well-known is that four years later, horrified by what was happening in Germany – and monitored by Pacelli – the Vatican issued a papal teaching document or encyclical on the situation there. Called With Burning Anxiety, it was written in German, not the usual Latin, and read out in all Catholic Churches in Germany on Palm Sunday, 1937. It endorsed the Jewish scriptures as worthy of respect and condemned the exaltation of race – in other words the Nazi obsession with the Aryan race. This so infuriated the Nazis they tried to confiscate copies of the encyclical. While that document was published by Pius XI and probably authored by Pacelli, it was also probably influenced by the thinking of a Jewish woman, Edith Stein. Stein, a philosopher, converted to Catholicism and became a Carmelite nun. Stein was later arrested and died in Auschwitz in 1942. Her extensive body of writing, including the substantial letter she wrote to Pius XI, warning of the Nazis’ desire to destroy the Jews and their idolising of race and power, as well as her thinking on Mary, survives. Stein saw Mary as the ideal woman, nurturing and sustaining others. A woman imitate Mary, not only in the home but in the workplace, Stein wrote, “conscious of where there is want and where help is needed, intervening and regulating as far as it is possible….Then will she, like a good spirit, spread blessing everywhere.” A good spirit that spreads blessings everywhere – that is an aspiration inspired by one Jewish woman writing of another and one I cherish on the feast of the Assumption.

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About

Reflections from a faith perspective on issues and people in the news.

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  • Creator
    BBC Radio 4
  • Years Active
    2007 - 2026
  • Episodes
    27
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © (C) BBC 2026
  • Show Website
    Thought for the Day

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