Naked Reflections, from the Naked Scientists
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Naked Reflections, from the Naked Scientists
Reflecting on recent science news stories and current events, authoritative thinkers unpack the implications for society. Naked Reflections is chaired by Ed Kessler, director of the Woolf Institute, Cambridge.
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Love the other
LOVE THE OTHER can mean many things. For a psychologist it can imply two contrasting personalities coming together in a complementary and constructive...
Turning the other cheek
How practical is Jesus's advice to turn the other cheek? Some see it as an example of the excessive passivity of Christianity. Others think it's the o...
The Politics of Music
Music - that most abstract of arts - can of course express religious feeling but it can also be directly or obliquely political, especially when lyric...
Good Luck
Can positive thinking create its own momentum, or to put it another way, does negativity reap its own bad harvest? Esther-Miriam Wagner and Robert Tom...
Time to stop talking?
If you asked the Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees, to discuss cosmology with a "flat-Earther", he would probably politely decline. But when it comes to m...
8 Billion and Counting
The United Nations recently announced that by their estimate World population passed the 8 billion mark in November 2022. World population is predicte...
Refugees and Migrants
The system for those seeking asylum in the UK is not working, with damaging effects across society and for refugees. That's why the Woolf Institute ha...
The National Health Service
Since the COVID pandemic, satisfaction ratings with the National Health Service have plummeted. Should we look to other countries for alternative mode...
Faith in Mental Health
What do people of faith think about the psychological and psychiatric approach to dealing with mental health problems? Is there a sense for some that...
Modern Slavery
Modern slavery is going on all around us. Brothels, nail bars, car wash outlets and some wealthy households all need victims who they can exploit, and...
Hope and Fear
For Muslims it's coming, but it's shrouded in mystery; for Christians it's straightforwardly the return of Christ; for Hindus there's the get-out card...
Hate
Hatred is something most people feel some of the time but how should it be controlled? Certainly not by giving free rein to social media platforms to...
Feeding Body and Soul
It would be an exaggeration to say that there are as many beliefs about what and how we should eat as there are beliefs about religion but sometimes i...
Blasphemy on the Big Screen
There is no orthodoxy that could not have been construed as blasphemous when it started. Christianity was accused by Jews of being blasphemous for pro...
Summer Special: QAnon and Sex
We've combined extracts from two of our favourite episodes into a Summer Special covering QAnon and Sex. QAnon, the claim a pizza joint in Washington...
Discipline versus Creativity
When it comes to learning and education, there has always been a tension between discipline and creativity or scepticism. The balance has ebbed and fl...
Odds on Either Way...
Two and a half billion pounds was wagered on the last soccer World Cup in the U.K. alone. There are reckoned to be 400 thousand problem gamblers in th...
Suicide
Suicide is more common than we might think: no one is immune from suicidal thoughts and there are more than 5,000 actual deaths by suicide in the UK e...
Fortress Europe
Are we in danger of weaponising Christianity as a bulwark against Islam? Would it be more fruitful to pay more attention to the period in medieval Spa...
Memories and Memorising
Memory is unreliable and can even be treacherous. Think of all those criminal trials where two witnesses recall an event in totally contradictory ways...
Sanctuary
The idea of sanctuary for the oppressed individual or for groups of people fleeing persecution or war is an ancient and noble one. In biblical times t...
God on
The Archbishop of Canterbury ruffled some feathers in government circles when he said that there were "serious ethical questions about sending asylum...
QAnon
There's a pizza joint in Washington DC where a cabal of satanic child abusers meets to brag about their exploits. During his presidency Donald Trump g...
Diaspora
Diasporas are often born of misfortune, the experience of homelands left willingly because of lack of opportunity, or fled because of war. In the age...
Believing and Belonging
Lots of us feel the need to believe in something in order to make sense of the world whether it takes the form of religious faith, the provability of...
The F Word
"Without forgiveness there is no future." So said the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa. But do we have it in us to forgive the most egregi...
The Great Awoke-ning
The phrase "stay woke" first emerged in America in the 1930s. Black singer-songwriter Huddie Ledbetter used the phrase in the song "Scottsboro Boys",...
Getting Ready to Die
Compassion, common sense and expert knowledge are what we would hope a good doctor would bring to the process of managing a death. But with more and m...
Sex
To read the KAMA SUTRA or the SONG OF SONGS you might feel religion is obsessed with sex. Yet so often the discussion of sex has been a problem in Chu...
Genocide
The twentieth century was littered with genocides. Those in Armenia, Nazi Germany, Rwanda and Bosnia are the most notorious ... Meryem Kalayci and Jam...
Blessed Algorithms
We have Alexa, we have drones in the sky, killer robots on the battlefield and creepy algorithms designed to anticipate our every need. But do we lose...
Climate Change and Human Behaviour
At one point in the summer of 2021, wild fires were raging all around the Mediterranean from Greece to Spain and from France to Morocco. Even the most...
Musical Networks
It's a long way from Victorian synagogues to Twentieth Century recording studios but both provided a catalyst for musical sharing and cultural enrichm...
Speaking of silence
We may not think so, but the idea of silence is deeply embedded in mainstream culture and religion. Silent prayer, the yearly Remembrance Day observat...
Reflecting on Wisdom and Greatness
How do we measure what wisdom scientists, religious leaders or politicians have? Sometimes we intuit it without quite knowing why. Sometimes we are wr...
Where do religious beliefs come from?
Where do religious beliefs come from? It's a perfectly reasonable question, and it's a question that even the fervent atheist might ask, although Rich...
Gender and society
In the Abrahamic tradition, God is nearly always referred to with a male pronoun, though presumably God has no gender. One of the dominant scientific...
Reflecting on Stephen Hawking
Stephen Hawking, who died in March 2018, was no ordinary scientist. His book A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME was an international best seller and he became a...
Reflecting on a Blinding Light
Light is one of the fundamental mysteries of our world. We still don't fully understand it. As an idea it is central to both philosophy and theology....
Reflecting on Living in Harmony
LIVING IN HARMONY is a Woolf Institute outreach project which promotes understanding between Jews Muslims and Christians by demonstrating the shared m...