Main content

Prayer and Snake Oil

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.

Available now

14 minutes

Broadcasts

  • Thu 1 Mar 2018 22:45
  • Thu 4 Jul 2019 22:45

Death in Trieste

Death in Trieste

A 1760s murder still informs ideas about aesthetics, a certain sort of sex, and death.

Watch: My Deaf World

Watch: My Deaf World

Five compelling experiences of what it is like to be deaf in 21st-century Britain.

The Book that Changed Me

Five figures from the arts and science introduce books that changed their lives and work.

Download The Essay

Download The Essay

Download all the episodes from the series and listen at your leisure.

Podcast