What Does It Take to Create a Shared Home in a Divided City?

In Jerusalem, two women from opposite sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide, Riman Barakat and Karen Brunwasser, have spent more than a decade building FeelBeit, a shared arts and cultural space where Israeli and Palestinian artists and communities are invited to ‘feel at home’ together.

In this moving conversation, recorded live at Aspen Ideas Festival, we explore what it takes to build trust across a profound divide—and what happens when that trust is tested by violence, grief and fear.

We also cover:

• Friendship and why relationships can be a form of peacebuilding
• What happened at FeelBeit after October 7 and in the years since
• The power of art to hold grief, anger, joy and hope at the same time
• Why “compassion over righteous indignation” and “self-love and self-critique” might be some of the hardest—and most necessary—practices for our societies

🎙️ Listen to The Sacred: linktr.ee/sacredpodcast

📖 Follow Elizabeth Oldfield: www.elizabetholdfield.com/

💡 The Sacred is produced by Theos Think Tank in partnership with Comment Magazine, and with support from The Jerusalem Trust and Open Society Foundations

👉 Check out FeelBeit: https://feelbeit.com/underconstruction/

Our guests and listeners to our podcast come from all kinds of perspectives and what draws us together is a desire to be self-aware about our own values and curious about other peoples. Comment your reflections below, we read them all 👇

Can you really vote your way to a good society - or does it have to be built house by house, street by street?

Dr James Vitali - Head of Political Economy at Policy Exchange, a Sandhurst-trained army reservist, local councillor, and author of The Ownership Society: How Bourgeois Values Can Save Britain - talks about the Dorset church at the heart of his childhood, what military service taught him about sacrifice and leadership, and why he believes Britain's real crisis is moral, not economic.

In this conversation we also explored:

• Growing up between Navy deployments, and the community that stepped in

• "Servant leadership" and why politics keeps failing to practise it

• Home ownership, responsibility, and not being able to buy

• Thatcher, Tocqueville, and where conservatism lost the plot

• The human cost of localism - and what to do with the suffering in between

🎙️ Listen to The Sacred: linktr.ee/sacredpodcast

📖 Follow Elizabeth Oldfield: www.elizabetholdfield.com/

💡 The Sacred is produced by Theos Think Tank in partnership with Comment Magazine, and with support from The Jerusalem Trust and Open Society Foundations

👉 Read James' book, The Ownership Society: How Bourgeois Values Can Save Britain https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=the-ownership-society-how-bourgeois-values-can-save-britain--9781509569526

👇 Our guests and listeners to our podcast come from all kinds of perspectives and what draws us together is a desire to be self-aware about our own values and curious about other peoples. Comment your reflections below, we read them all.

Chapters:

00:00 – Intro: meeting James Vitali

01:56 – What is sacred to you?

04:13 – A rooted military childhood in Dorset

10:32 – Faith, and how it shapes his politics

15:27 – Sandhurst and learning servant leadership

18:37 – Why politics became technical instead of moral

20:43 – Thatcher's legacy and "no such thing as society"

29:24 – Almshouses and the Vale Pantry: ownership in action

32:24 – The Ownership Society: why "bourgeois values"?

37:30 – A state that isn't neutral: "statecraft is soulcraft"

44:12 – Elizabeth's own story, and why ownership matters to the soul

53:07 – Closing reflections: "biography over beliefs"

COPYRIGHT: "Video Cat Jazz" - Pär Hagström (Licensed by Epidemic Sound) & "Beyond the Veil" (feat. Khamir Music) by Simon Wester (Licensed by Musicbed).

What does it mean to prepare to die—and then discover that you need to prepare to live again?

In this conversation, poet Christian Wiman reflects on faith, poetry, love, mortality, and his experience of living for more than 20 years with cancer.

He talks about his turbulent childhood, how poetry transformed his anger into something creative, and why he believes poems can open us to something beyond ourselves.

The conversation also explores:

• Wiman’s journey from economics to poetry
• What a poem actually is—and why sound can matter more than meaning
• Attention and his idea of “productive inattention”
• Faith, suffering, and writers including Simone Weil and Etty Hillesum

Wiman also reads three poems: Five Houses Down, 2047 Grace Street, and In the Time of Fire.

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🎙️ Listen to The Sacred: linktr.ee/sacredpodcast

📖 Follow Elizabeth Oldfield: www.elizabetholdfield.com/

💡 The Sacred is produced by Theos Think Tank in partnership with Comment Magazine, and with support from The Jerusalem Trust and Open Society Foundations

👉 See Christian Wiman's Poetry: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/christian-wiman --

👇 Our guests and listeners to our podcast come from all kinds of perspectives and what draws us together is a desire to be self-aware about our own values and curious about other peoples. Comment your reflections below, we read them all.