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BBC Radio 4 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced BBC Home Service.

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Start the Week

Discussion & Talk

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Weekly discussion programme, setting the cultural agenda every Monday

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Amol Rajan

Naomi Alderman

Richard Holloway

Laurie Stras

Malcolm Guite

Katy Hickman

Start the Week: Faith and Doubt

Faith and Doubt

02/04/2018

BBC Radio 4 - Start the Week, Faith and Doubt

Amol Rajan with Naomi Alderman, Richard Holloway, Laurie Stras and Malcolm Guite.

Amol Rajan discusses faith with Naomi Alderman, Richard Holloway, Laurie Stras and Malcolm Guite.

Amol Rajan discusses faith and doubt. Religion is a recurrent theme in Naomi Alderman's novels. Her first book, Disobedience, explored a Jewish girl's split with orthodox religion, while in Liar's Gospel she told multiple stories of Jesus through the eyes of those around him.

Obedience was a virtue for the nuns of sixteenth-century Italy, but the music they wrote and sang was far less virtuous. Music professor and performer Laurie Stras has unearthed sensual and experimental works by nuns including the daughter of Lucrezia Borgia. And while many flocked to the nunneries to hear these women perform, others accused them of irreligious vanity.

Historian and Anglican priest Malcolm Guite tells the life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and finds religious imagery permeating Coleridge's most famous work, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

And the writer and former Bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway, asks how spiritual belief can help us face our mortality, in his new book Waiting for the Last Bus.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

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