HANNAH FRENCH visited Christ Church, Oxford, on The Early Music Show (Radio 3, Sunday) to help to celebrate the 500th anniversary of what was initially Cardinal College (News, 17 October 2025). The era’s political and theological turbulence is clear even in the music composed in the college’s early years: one motet that John Taverner, the college’s first organist, wrote in praise of Cardinal Wolsey was later adapted to laud Henry VIII. It was Henry who, in 1546, refounded the college and gave its chapel its modern status as the cathedral for the then new diocese of Oxford.
Much of the music was specially recorded for the programme, with a sound that was sometimes scintillating: Christ Church choir’s notably robust trebles pack a real punch, perhaps reflecting the integration of girls into the choir in 2019. Nor was all the music choral: Hugh Aston’s “Hornpype” for harpsichord made for a refreshing change of ambience.
Interviews with choristers and lay clerks gave the programme personality, and it was good to hear young people speak so confidently of their love for, and commitment to, the Anglican choral tradition.
Sunday’s (Radio 4) continuing series on the “quiet revival” gave the sceptics their day this week. Andrew Copson, of Humanists UK, argued that the latest results of the annual British Social Attitudes survey definitively contradicted the Bible Society’s “false figures”, which had set the quiet-revival discourse going (Feature, 15 August 2025). Professor Linda Woodhead made the interesting observation that, while Christianity had lost almost all cultural influence, more recently the sway of secularism had also declined, and there was now much less social stigma in practising Christianity than 20 years ago.
Perhaps that is reflected in the way in which the Burnley-based independent pastor Mick Fleming (Books, 24 February 2023) has become quite the regular on various BBC outlets in a way that would once have been unimaginable. Heart and Soul (BBC World Service, Friday) explored a remarkable life story at its face value.
Brought up in the sort of decent, if authoritarian, working-class churchgoing family that no longer really exists, Pastor Fleming turned to a life of crime after adolescent experiences of sexual abuse and sibling death. After he had spent a quarter of a century as a dealer and violent enforcer, a series of transcendent spiritual experiences began when he was waiting to shoot a man. The long and complex road to faith and stability from there formed the meat of the programme. That road ran through forgiving his abuser.
As my friends and parishioners currently seem transfixed by events in the United States, I recommend the latest in Radio 4’s Understand documentary series, “An American Journey”, with James Naughtie (Mondays). Last week’s episode jaunts between the migration of Italians to the US, African-Americans there, the origins of the Republican Party, and how 1960s social movements reconstructed electoral coalitions.
