During lockdown, Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch’s ‘churchcrawls’, defined as “like a pub crawl, only with churches”, retreated to one single place that he knows well. In his final essay, the historian takes us to his local parish church of St Barnabas Jericho in Oxford, which has become a version of home to him, like the parish church of Wetherden was in his Suffolk boyhood. Diarmaid explores how this Anglo-Catholic church was built by a wealthy Victorian industrialist and its huge Italian basilica with a hint of Byzantium is the sort of church you find on the islands of Venice. Its rich interior has a lingering scent of incense, wall mosaics, paintings by pre-Raphaelites and an altar with a gleaming golden canopy. Diarmaid has had some bruising experiences with organised religion, not least being refused ordination to the priesthood for being openly gay. It might then seem surprising that St Barnabas’s very traditional form of Anglo-Catholicism is where he feels most at home, but he says, “all this ritual discipline sets my imagination free.”

Produced by Melissa FitzGerald
A Blakeway production for BBC Radio 3 Show less