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A look at the ethical and religious issues of the week

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Sunday: Leonard Cohen's Spirituality; Is Faith Being Left Out Of COP 26?; St Cuthbert

07/11/2021

Leonard Cohen's Spirituality; Is Faith Being Left Out Of COP 26?; St Cuthbert

BBC Radio 4 - Sunday, Leonard Cohen's Spirituality; Is Faith Being Left Out Of COP 26?; St Cuthbert

Edward Stourton with a look at the ethical and religious issues of the week.

A look at the ethical and religious issues of the week with Edward Stourton.

The singer Leonard Cohen, who died five years ago, tells the story that a friend once told him: "You never met a religion you didn't like". Listen in to our investigation of his spiritual life and we're fairly confident you'll never hear a Cohen song in quite the same way again. Though he fell out with the Montreal Jewish community he grew up in, his music fuses Judaism and Christianity as well as ideas from Zen Buddism. We hear Cohen's own views on faith from the BBC archive, talk to Harry Freedman author of Leonard Cohen: The mystical roots of genius and of course, hear those songs alongside their inspirations from the Talmud, the Kabbalah and the Bible.

Is faith central to the debate about caring for the environment? This week the UK's Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis said religious leaders were left to "scramble around" for the chance to make their voices heard at COP 26, the UN summit aimed at bringing climate change under control. As the conference enters a second week Edward Stourton talks to faith leaders about their experiences, what exactly they have to add to the debate and how they're going to make themselves heard in week two.

Also in the programme: the young German Catholics attempting to get the church to spell God with a gender star. They say that the image of a male, white God is putting many young people off religion. And where's Cuthbert? This week York Minster replaced a window dedicated to the influential St Cuthbert. Its one of the largest surviving narrative windows in Europe and the only one telling the story of the saint who was a Medieval superstar. Edward finds out what the window tells us of the hermit and how to pick out Cuthbert himself from a window that is celebrated as a "Lancastrian who's who's".

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