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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

BBC Radio 3

Radio 3

The Essay Podcast

The Essay

Discussion & Talk

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond, themed across a week - insight, opinion and intellectual surprise.

The Essay: Are You Paying Attention?: Prayer and Snake Oil

Prayer and Snake Oil

Are You Paying Attention?

BBC Radio 3 - The Essay, Are You Paying Attention?, Prayer and Snake OilClose menu

Writer Madeleine Bunting explores some key moments in the history of attention.

The writer and journalist Madeleine Bunting continues her series of Essays with a closer look at how we have paid attention at different points in history.

In the fourth in her series of Essays on attention, the writer and journalist Madeleine Bunting explores some key moments in the history of how we have paid attention, or failed to do so. The church, she finds, has perfected the use of ritual to focus our attention; and the habit of attention, as French mystic Simone Weil argued, can even be seen as the substance of prayer. But similar ways of attracting and holding attention have also been put to far more sinister use.

The Essay: Are You Paying Attention?

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

A week-long exploration of why attention has become a major social concern.

A week-long exploration of why our attention has become a major social concern - and how our attention is harnessed to make money.

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