Meeting People
Amul Pandya converses with independent, adventurous and sometimes courteous free spirits. Creativity is an act of rebellion. Whether they are entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, investors, chefs, or corporate antagonists, Amul's guests all share a common disposition of not just pushing boundaries but re-drawing landscapes.
Meeting People
The Revd Prebendary Dr Isabelle Hamley - Spirituality, meaning, justice, and the Church of England
Isabelle was previously chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury and now serves as Principal at Ridley Hall a theological college in Cambridge.
We discuss the meaning of justice and mercy, the pursuit of purpose for mental health, and what can be learned from old stories such as the Book of Judges and the Book of Ruth.
We also touch on some of the potential failings of the Anglican church but also a tentative Gen-Z revival in Sunday attendance.
Isabelle has worked as a probation officer and is an ambassador for Sanctuary Mental Health UK. You can find more about her publications, journals and community work here: https://www.ridley.cam.ac.uk/team/the-revd-prebendary-dr-isabelle-hamley.
Great, good to go. Sorry, last question how do I address you?
Isabelle Hamley:Isabelle is fine. Reverend your grace, your holiness, None of that.
Amul Pandya:None of that, okay, fine.
Amul Pandya:He'd be laughing his head off if you did. Hello and welcome to Meeting People with me, Amul Pandya. Meeting People is a podcast where I have long conversations with rebellious, adventurous and sometimes courteous free spirits. Isabel, thank you very much for sparing the time. We've got lots to talk about. I thought where we would start is with your role as chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury. And before you go into that, can you you, because a lot of people in the audience aren't as on top of the Church of England as they should be.
Amul Pandya:Who is the Archbishop of Canterbury? What is the role, what function does it serve? And then we can talk about the chaplain to that role, if that makes sense.
Isabelle Hamley:So the Archbishop of Canterbury is a bishop in the Church of England, which means he has oversight or not a lot of direct power, but he's a spiritual leader for the Church of England and for the Anglican Communion. So Anglican churches in most countries of the world, so it's a big communion, not as big as the Roman Catholic, but still a very sizable number of people.
Isabelle Hamley:So you have people in the Anglican community in Uganda and Uganda has a big Anglican church actually Uganda and Nigeria, but you have people in South America, in North America, in Asia, in India, in Egypt and just really all over the world.
Amul Pandya:And they all feed into the top of the food chain or the pyramids, is the archbishop?
Isabelle Hamley:Yes, the interesting thing is that we don't have a hierarchy of power as such, so the archbishop cannot order anybody to do anything. He doesn't have that kind of executive power. But what he has is the power to convene people to come together, the power to influence, the power to speak out in ways that will kind of gently or not so gently bring people around the table and bring people to speak and to do things.
Amul Pandya:So it's not as official as the Pope let's say it's not like the Pope.
Isabelle Hamley:No, so in a sense, politically he has a lot of influence and can do things a little bit like the Pope, but actually, practically in the church, he doesn't have the type of authority that the Pope wields. Because the Anglican Community isn't one organisation, it's a group of churches who choose to be together, but actually they're autonomous, not independent, but each province, each part of the communion is autonomous.
Amul Pandya:Okay, and is there an Anglican community in France? Obviously, guests will have noticed that there's an accent that Isabelle is currently showing. But is there an Anglican community in France?
Isabelle Hamley:There is, it's quite small and I wasn't in touch with it when. I was growing up in France, but funnily enough it's a part of the Church of England, so it's the diocese in Europe that's got Anglican churches. In the rest of Europe they're called chaplaincies rather than churches.
Amul Pandya:So you joined the Anglican community when you moved to England.
Isabelle Hamley:Yeah, mostly. I mean I sometimes say I'm a little bit of an accidental Anglican. I mean I sometimes say I'm a little bit of an accidental Anglican. I fell into the Church of England because I happened to go to a church in England that wasn't Anglican. But then I met my husband. He happened to go to an Anglican church so I went with him and that's kind of how I became a part of the Church of England but in a sense for me I'm part of the Christian church.
Amul Pandya:I want to come on to the term ecumenism later, which we can talk about, but I think, um, um, before we get there, let's do a bit of background then. So obviously you've you've been in the anglican community for a long time and it's probably without meaning to prematurely age you. But, um, it's changed a lot and you were one of the first women to be ordained Am I right in saying that? And so you were kind of was it in 1994?
Isabelle Hamley:I wasn't ordained that long ago.
Amul Pandya:No, okay, but you were part of that. Were you part of some sort of celebration of that ordination?
Isabelle Hamley:Yes, I mean, I wasn't in the Church of England back then, I think.
Isabelle Hamley:So I vaguely remember that I was in the Church of England when the first women were made bishops, which is not that long ago. So that's still quite recent in the history of the Church of England and so I would say in terms of being ordained I'm probably the second generation of women. But that means that I often find myself in jobs when I'm the first woman to ever do that job in the Church of England. So when I was a parish priest I was the first female vicar in that specific church here at Tridley Hall. I'm the first woman to do the job. In my previous job as theological advisor to the house of bishops, I was the first woman to do the job yeah, and did that?
Amul Pandya:did that? Weigh on you or were you just look? Doesn't matter whether a woman or a man, like you know, I just this is a job and I'm going to do it, or was it? Was there an extra added I? Think the sense of um occasion to it.
Isabelle Hamley:I think there's always something extra, whether you want it or not. I didn't, I didn't particularly want it to be a thing, but the fact is it is a thing because people look at you differently. I think as a woman you still have to be a thing, but the fact is it is a thing because people look at you differently. I think as a woman you still have to be twice as good as a man, often because you're judged as a woman. I remember quite vividly when I was first ordained, going to preach somewhere in a church and people saying oh, it's so good to hear a woman who can preach well. And you think there's plenty of men who preach badly, badly. But you would never say to a man it's good to hear a man who can preach well, but as a woman, people comment not just on your skills but, the fact that you're a woman exercising those skills, so I think that's always is that still the case now, or?
Isabelle Hamley:I would say so. I think less in some areas, but but in some other ways I think you still. You still notice that you're a woman and I think, being being a woman now in the church, it still feels like there are spaces where we're still trying to work at it, work out what it means to be a woman, um, in a space that has been largely shaped by male leadership, what does this mean? I don't want to be an honorary man, but actually I don't have many role models of how to lead as a woman and I don't want to be essentialist about what it means to be a man and a woman, but I do think women and men are socialised differently and, as a result, we lead differently.
Amul Pandya:But we haven't quite quite, I think developed a sense of how women lead and how that's appreciated more widely because I guess a lot of female, successful female leaders I mean, we don't have to go too far down this rabbit hole, but um, have kind of mimicked male leadership, yes, and so we're still groping our way towards finding what, as you say, what is a kind of feminine sense of leadership yes, we have, and I and maybe maybe it's not just about gender, maybe it's certain types of male leaderships are what we use as models and actually we're trying to find a much more hospitable and broad way of thinking about leadership that enables different types of people to lead in different ways.
Isabelle Hamley:But I think, certainly as a woman, I do feel a sense of pressure as a woman, leading and being judged as a woman and knowing. You know, it's the small things, the things like you know, if a woman is assertive where a man would be said to be assertive, a woman is often perceived as aggressive or bossy or you know all these things, and so I think that always affects your ability to lead in a way.
Amul Pandya:And I guess, unlike the City of London or academia, there was obviously a big contentious debate as to whether you should even have you no one really argued against female academics or female ceos or investment bankers but, there was a kind of constitutional debate as to whether we should have and other churches, other religions still have, are having this now and the church thing is obviously very forward, or the anglican community is very forward thinking of this. But was that that must have added to the sense of, like a lot of people I'm preaching to probably don't even think I should be here standing up here talking to them.
Isabelle Hamley:Yeah, they do. And in the Church of England there is still a provision If a local church does not want to have a female priest, they can say we don't want a female priest and that's allowed, and so there still is a degree of discrimination kind of inscribed in our practice. I mean, that's complicated because I think there are arguments about, you know, if somebody, do we want to make space for different views, for different ways of being, or do we want to be a monolithic institution? And I think one of the things that's quite distinctive, I think, about the Anglican way of doing things is that we have quite a breadth and we tend to try and hold lots of people and lots of different views together rather than push fragmentation or division. You know, we're not. We're not saying, well, it's our way or the highway. We're saying, okay, how can we find a way of living well with very, very different views and opinions?
Amul Pandya:So you worked your way up and you ended up becoming this sort of spiritual advisor to the top figure in the Anglican community. I was trying to look at previous people in history who've had that role. One example is Cardinal Wolsey, who was quite an interesting fellow who ended up meeting a sticky end because he couldn't get Henry VIII the divorce he wanted.
Amul Pandya:So I'm hoping King Charles hasn't asked you to sort out any marital status which will lead you down a path to Rome and all the rest. But how did you come to the role? How did you find it? What did you learn from it? What did you experience that you didn't expect to experience?
Isabelle Hamley:So how I came to the role is quite interesting, because I never thought myself good enough for the job so it didn't occur to me to apply seriously. But my husband dared me to apply. So we had a bit of a joke and a bit of banter and I sent in an application which was a bit of a joke, but it was taken seriously and I was invited for first interview and then second interview and then third interview started getting real and then thought oh my goodness, what do I do if this actually happens?
Isabelle Hamley:so there was something quite interesting about confidence and kind of thinking what is needed.
Isabelle Hamley:Now the role isn't particularly well known, I think, as the chaplain to the archbishop you're often the person behind the scenes who does lots of stuff behind the scenes but just enables the ministry of the archbishop. But part of the job was to kind of have pastoral oversight over Lambeth Palace and everybody who lived and worked there, including the archbishop, overseeing the worship and then working with the archbishop on all his liturgical engagements, on things like what he was writing, and kind of have oversight of writing, do some ghostwriting for him, be part of his senior team so you know you're part of the senior leadership team and then kind of travel with him. So a lot of my job was around theology and liturgy and then I represented the Archbishop on a number of kind of things. You know the Anglican Centre in Rome, which is the Anglican Communion's kind of embassy to the Holy See, to the Roman Catholic Church, so I was on the board for that and I did several things like that kind of representing the archbishop.
Amul Pandya:So you were based in Lambeth, is that right? Yes, hence you lived in Elephant Castle. Yes, that makes sense. Okay, it's good to commute that. And I mean it was just when Matt told me that I didn't even know this role existed, because you assume it's like you know who does God go to for spiritual advice. It's like you always assume the person at the top is sort of you know, knows it all. So it's almost like you know the doctor's doctor or the guardian's guardian. Do you feel like, sorry, excuse me, what can I tell this person that they don't already know? Yeah, totally.
Isabelle Hamley:And I think I'm not sure how I understood the role when I first applied for it, I saw it mostly as a support role rather than giving advice. I think it did turn into more of an advisory position because I have a background in theology and I'm very grounded in that area. But we also worked as a team and for me that's something that I really valued out of my time at Lambeth Palace. When I arrived, we had a senior team of about 10 people. We each had specific areas of expertise, specific areas that we knew well, so there was an advisor on well, so there was an advisor on reconciliation, there was some an advisor on interfaith relations and advisor on ecumenism. As the chaplain, most of my job was around theology and liturgy, but it felt like whatever we did, we did as a team and so I didn't feel like I was giving advice alone. We felt like we discussed together as a team and with the Archbishop what we were doing and and really made you know decisions together and stress tested a lot of our decisions together, and that's probably one of the main things that I've kind of taken out of my life, of my time at Lombeth, was that those those years that I was there, the senior team worked really, really well. It worked well as a team.
Isabelle Hamley:I think one of the things that I learned as a leader from Archbishop Justin is that he wasn't afraid of appointing people who were really good at what they were doing. So my colleagues were just all really really good, impressive people, and it felt like sometimes as a leader there's, you know, you can feel threatened by talented people was just he didn't. He just had people around him that he could trust in the area in which they gave advice or they did work, because they were good at what they were doing, and then, as a team, we didn't feel threatened by one another either. So we worked really well. But I think that's, you know, that's an ideal kind of version of a team really.
Amul Pandya:Can you point to anything kind of in specifics that you felt was achieved in your time there, that the Church of England wasn't doing that it is doing, or that it was doing that it shouldn't have been doing? That you kind of? Or is the role more kind of preservation and elongation and making sure that things know things aren't too, too disrupted?
Isabelle Hamley:it's complex because the the role of the archbishop is so multifaceted. I think there's different answers for different parts of different parts of the job. I think in terms of the church of england, there is a sense in which there is a role about preservation and elongation, but that doesn't happen unless you innovate and unless you respond to new challenges. So I think under Justin's kind of archbishopric there's been a change in how we we think about strategic work, about you know who we are as a church, what is our space in the life of the nation, and that's work, that's long term work that we're carrying on thinking. But there were some more specific things that you know. So the archbishop gets involved in some conflict mediation and work with the UN and things like that, or striking new agreements with other churches on how we're going to relate together. And there was work in the life of the nation, you know at the time around COVID. So there's like a number of things that were achieved, but often it's as part of a kind of an ongoing kind of sense of work.
Amul Pandya:And yeah, as ever, the answer to these things. As you said, it's complicated.
Isabelle Hamley:Yes.
Amul Pandya:Why did you leave?
Isabelle Hamley:So I did the job for three and a half years, almost four. It's a really tiring job. There's something really strange about working in a private office, as it were, because you're entirely dependent on what you call the principal, so the the main person, um, and to a degree, even if you have your own area of leadership, you're you're always behind that other person, and that's okay for a while. But there comes a point at which you know I was doing a lot of writing for the Archbishop, for instance, and I needed to step back and find my own voice again and find my own space. I think I kind of outgrew the job a little bit, so I was ready for a new challenge, for something different.
Isabelle Hamley:But also the pace was relentless. So you know you just work a lot of hours. It feels like you're constantly on call. I mean, the archbishop himself was just like a workhorse, but a lot of people don't realize quite how much work goes into enabling the ministry of a very public international figure. So you need a big team and often the team just has an incredible amount of work. I did lots of travelling, which was wonderful, but actually you get tired of travelling.
Amul Pandya:Yes, I can sympathise with that, and you ended up at Ridley Hall, which is where we are now. Can you tell us a little bit about Ridley Hall?
Isabelle Hamley:Yes, so Ridley Hall is an Anglican theological college where we train people for ordain and lay ministry in the Church of England, so for people who want to work for the church basically, and we have some independent students who just want to study theology. So we do a mix of things and we teach from below undergraduate level, so kind of access course level all the way to PhD students, degrees, masters kind of everything.
Amul Pandya:I'm guessing it was named after Latimer Ridley from back in Elizabethan days.
Isabelle Hamley:Nicholas Ridley.
Amul Pandya:yes, how old is the institution?
Isabelle Hamley:It's about 150 years so late, Victorian.
Amul Pandya:And how are you finding it? I mean, I don't want to say you're not working hard, but the different pace, intensity is a different type of work. Are you finding that actually a bit sleepy and you're missing the hustle and bustle of flying around and kind of having high-level meetings at the UN and other churches, or is it actually is a new type of focus for you, that's refreshing.
Isabelle Hamley:It's a little bit of both. I enjoy having a slower pace. I have to say it still is busy, but in a different way. I just I love teaching, I love academia. I'm an academic myself, you know. So I think being in this kind of setting really suits me. I miss some of the international work. So, you know, the best part of my job, I think, as chaplain to the archbishop was probably going around the Anglican communion, the travel, meeting people and having a hand in some pretty cool stuff. You know, whether it's going abroad and meeting quite extraordinary people, or involvement with the royal family or you know, national events of importance.
Isabelle Hamley:There is something that's quite exciting about that, so I miss some of that. But on the other hand, I'm also involved in, you know, the World Council of Churches now and in various things to do with the Church of England that I still retain, you know, a foot in those spaces. But I get to pick what I'm involved in and I'm involved in my own right rather than as somebody who works with the Archbishop and I think that's quite.
Amul Pandya:I quite like that actually yeah, as you say, finding your own voice, and I mean you, you, um. You said something interesting that your theology is your kind of, which is, you know, for someone who's not part of the establishment, sounds a bit weird.
Isabelle Hamley:It's like well of course it is.
Amul Pandya:Why wouldn't it be? But actually I'm guessing there's people um in the anglican community who you know they do the minimum theology necessary but they actually prefer being out and about. But to you the kind of the scripture is something that you find you're more interested in than your average person in your profession.
Isabelle Hamley:I would say so. I think people do theology in lots of different ways. I think the minute a human person says something about God, that's doing theology. So I think there's lots of different ways of doing theology, but I've always I wouldn't like to be a full-time academic just doing theology. I like doing theology in relationship with the life of the church because for me it's about yeah, it's about how theology shapes the way in which I engage with the world in which we live as human beings. But it's also about looking at what's happening in the wider world, how we, you know, how we behave as human beings, whether there is hope in the wider world, and reflecting on that kind of through the lens of my faith. And so for me there is this need to kind of have a foot in both camps, in a kind of quite active, experiential kind of life and taking steps back and reflecting.
Amul Pandya:So it's kind of like applied physics versus theoretical physics?
Isabelle Hamley:Yeah, it is. How can we call these theories? How do we actually solve fusion or whatever it is.
Amul Pandya:Before we go into the theology, talk about your time as a probation officer. Were you part of the church then, or was that before?
Isabelle Hamley:So it's a long story, but I started to train to be a minister a long time ago, not in the Church of England, but then I felt like I didn't want to just be in the church my entire life. I have a real passion for justice, issues of justice, something we call liberation theology, which is about looking at questions of power and justice and how the Christian scripture can help us kind of fight for justice and have an understanding of how the world can and should be. But I felt like I didn't want that to be just ideas. It felt like if I stayed, because I was teaching theology and I didn't want to stay in a kind of bubble, I wanted to test out what I thought kind of in practice. And so I trained to be a probation officer and then I practiced as a probation officer for several years. So I was a probation officer during the day and I still taught some theology in the evenings.
Amul Pandya:And what were you doing? So you were basically, was it deciding whether someone should be released earlier or was it had they been released, and you were deciding how well they were kind of coping in the real world.
Isabelle Hamley:Both. A lot of it was work with offenders on. You know, how did they come to where they are? How do we understand what has brought them to offending, how can we think about how they can turn their life around. So a lot of work. A lot of it was psychology and kind of working with a person.
Isabelle Hamley:In the end, I did a lot of work writing reports for courts, so advising the court on what could or should be done with somebody and looking at their life history and and how we could understand how somebody had got to where they were and what the hope was for, you know, rehabilitation for the work that could be done whilst they were in prison or if they were on a community sentence.
Amul Pandya:I mean it can be very demoralizing. You know, you see, you know a movie length, let's say, 90 minutes or two hours of of narrative where someone in the in the film goes in very damaged and they come out as this sort of wonderful human being. And actually it's very, probably quite rare, because you're looking at years and years of pain that that person has gone through before.
Amul Pandya:You know, isabella, whoever comes into their life and tries to kind of encourage them. So did you find it, um more often than not, actually just bashing your head against a brick wall, or did you feel like you were kind of achieving something, or did it teach you something about human nature that you kind of didn't know?
Isabelle Hamley:I. I find that I enjoyed meeting the person. So I always find it it was a challenge to myself to think I'm a Christian. As a Christian, I believe that every person in the world is made in the image of God and therefore has value and dignity and beauty at the core of who they are. And I think with some of the people I worked with, you think, well, that's hidden very deep. So I find it a challenge to myself to think how do I, how do I see that person as made in the image of God and how do I enable that image to kind of come out? So and it wasn't what wasn't always easy there were some people who were so defended, so hurt and so so involved into whatever it was they were involved in that you felt like you were chipping away a little bit at a time. But I would say that with most of the people I worked with, there were moments where you could glimpse who that person was. You know that you can't reduce an entire person just to the fact that they're an offender.
Isabelle Hamley:There's a whole person there and I think if you try and find a person and you connect with them, then all kinds of other things become possible. But it's incremental and as a probation officer you see people for a very short amount of time. There's only so much you can do and often it felt like all the other factors that bear upon offending had more impact on these people than whatever I could do. But if at least I could be part of their journey and the other side, that actually being part of that person's journey was also about looking at how we help protect other people from whatever offending behaviour they're engaged in.
Isabelle Hamley:Exactly Because that's the other side, and I think you have to constantly balance. Yes, I want to find who that person is and I want to be compassionate and I want to understand how they came to where they are. But actually understanding isn't the same as excusing and finding that balance between holding people to account and helping them take responsibility for their own lives and their own choices, at the same time as looking at you know how we help them overcome whatever has shaped them. So finding that balance between those two things I think was part of the core of the job.
Amul Pandya:It's really tricky. I mean, I don't know how familiar with Tolstoy you are, but kind of later in his writing career, when he became much more spiritual, much more pacifist, almost very anti-violence, very anti-oppression. He was a big Georgist which we don't have to talk about on this podcast, but he wrote a book called Resurrection. I don't know if you've read thaturrection.
Isabelle Hamley:I haven't read that book.
Amul Pandya:I really recommend it. And the main character is this aristocrat who has lived a life of kind of indulgence and kind of slowly descends or ascends, I should say, into sort of a spiritual recognition that he needs to lighten oppression wherever he sees it. And he ends up sort of following this prostitute who he had initially set on this path and she gets convicted of a murder that she didn't do and he follows her to Siberia to help and then he went to help her kind of remove her sentence, and he's also surrounded by criminals. And he then has this sort of realization when to help her kind of remove her sentence, and it's also surrounded by criminals, and he then has this sort of realization, which is Tolstoy's voice basically speaking through him, that we as human beings have no place to imprison other human beings.
Amul Pandya:And I mean obviously he's talking in the Russian context in the 19th century where prison conditions are written and he talks about it in the novel and it's very vivid. But because we're all fallen creatures in his mind, we're all sinners, we're all um as bad as each other, we can't say, well, if I wasn't, if I was in this person's shoes, will I have done any better? Um and so and the and then. The other thing is you know, the? Um.
Amul Pandya:We need to do this because it kind of deters people we need to imprison people because it deters them, other people from doing it hasn't worked because you're getting growing prison populations and all the rest. So do you do you? Do you feel that that deterrence thing, where we do need to keep society safe and kind of lock people up for everyone's good on the one side, is not a good enough reason? I mean, how far down that kind of pacifist route are you?
Isabelle Hamley:So I don't really believe in deterrence. I don't think deterrence works because people commit crimes because they think they won't get caught. Deterrence works mostly with people who wouldn't do the thing in the first place. I do believe, however, that we need to keep people safe, and for me, that's where the place for prison is. You know, I mean, I've done reports and met with sex offenders who've abused children and I just don't think that they should be allowed to be free. I think we need, you know it's partly about holding them responsible for their actions, and I do. You know, I have heard terrible stories of the background to some of those sex offenders, but that doesn't justify letting them loose.
Isabelle Hamley:And I think prison has a place to play to keep people safe. Now I think we should only use prison for violent offences and the type of offence that really damages people. However, I can also see the point if somebody is a repeat petty offender and they don't respond to probation, they don't respond to community orders, what do you do with them? Because actually petty crime does have a cumulative effect on society and part of the problem is rehabilitation can work but it's expensive because working with people takes time Working, and I think often part of the causes of crime are complex. They're societal, socioeconomic causes, they're partly individual choices and they're partly how we're organised as a society. And if we only focus on the individual I think we're never going to crack it. But I also don't believe that everything is socially caused.
Isabelle Hamley:So I think one of the things that I find being a probation officer is that I went in as a very left-wing liberal I would say I'm still left-wing, but I'm probably slightly less than I was in that I went in thinking these people were all victims and how terrible and you know, maybe a little bit of a saviour complex.
Isabelle Hamley:I think working in probation made me think no, people make choices. There are loads of people who grow up with terrible parents or terrible, adverse childhood experiences and they don't turn to crime, they don't turn to hurting other people, and somehow there is an element of choice, an element of free will, an element of decision, and and we have to we have to recognize that in people, because otherwise you're being unfair to all of those communities that still live good, fair, just lives in the midst of adversity. And the people who suffer the most from crime are actually the people from the same community that that person has come out of, and if you don't hold them responsible and if you don't do something to try and address the issues, you're actually penalising the rest of that community.
Amul Pandya:And how does the Christian faith or doctrine enable, prevent repeat offence versus other approaches? What is it about that? Is it that everyone's got a soul and is equal in the eyes of God? That enables you to find the good in them, or are other? Let me put it another way. Actually, is the whole concept of preventing repeat offence actually a Christian kind of idea? Even if you drop the God side of it, you're just practicing Christianity.
Isabelle Hamley:I don't think Christians have a monopoly on kindness and compassion, so I think you can find it in different religious traditions and non-religious traditions. The probation service did have its origins in christian volunteers going into prison to spend time with people, so a long time ago in the 19th century. That is where it all started For me. What has influenced me is that, as a Christian, I believe that every person can have another chance and I believe that every person can have redemption. I don't write anybody off. I believe everybody should be given another chance. Actually, and because I believe in that notion of every person being made in the image of God, it doesn't allow me to write off another person, however terrible the thing they've done. I still think justice matters and I still think it might be right to keep that person in prison, but I cannot write them off as a person but these are christian.
Isabelle Hamley:The reason I asked the question is these are christian belief systems that you know atheists today or I mean, I'm not a christian myself, but um, well, not yet.
Amul Pandya:Let's see how we get on this conversation. But, um, I don't know if you're familiar with this kind of debates are happening at the moment between the kind of Dawkins, the AC Graylings of this world, who you know that our value system in the West is basically based on Steep it's human, it's innate and Christianity was actually a bit of a handbrake on that versus, let's say, the Tom Hollands of this world who are arguing you know everything, you know anti-slavery, you know equality. These are all deeply rooted in the radical idea of Christianity and we may have forgotten the God bit or the spirituality bit, but everything that the atheists hold dear is actually these are Christian values, whether they like them or not, and they're not kind of innate in us, they're kind of I'm talking about the West here, not about other parts of the world which are different.
Isabelle Hamley:I do think if you look at Western history, you do see a step change with the arrival of Christianity in terms of the values of the world. I think historically, it's very difficult not to argue that Christianity made a significant difference to how we understand other human beings, how we understand the world around us and how we behave ethically. As I said, I think you can find similar things in some other traditions.
Amul Pandya:But slavery, for example, was a universal equal opportunities norm and with the introduction of science it then became a kind of racial thing because you had this sort of scientific approach, pseudo-scientific approach to making it historically white people, whoever, were slaves, and then it became more of a racial thing. But it was the kind of the Christian. The reason why we're so anti-slavery now when we look back, is because we've got this Christian inheritance. And what's interesting, I think, is this kind of revisionism of history where you've actually had this sort of radical Protestants in the 18th century, so people like Edward Gibbon, who wanted to undermine the role of the Catholic Church. So they created this notion that there was just darkness.
Amul Pandya:We had the ancient Greeks and the Romans, aristotle, socrates, and then you had this sort of dark period when Catholicism took over and everything was destroyed, and now we've got enlightenment thanks to Protestantism, and atheism is just a kind of next iteration of radical Protestantism. But hopefully we're having this sort of uh revival. Actually let's go on to this actually, because I want to ask you this later there's, there's data out there now which shows that gen z is returning to the church. I think it was at the bible society or you're seeing this becoming a.
Amul Pandya:You know, my wife talked to me about this, said more people going to church, and she's not you know my wife talked to me about this, said more people are going to church and she's not steeped in data about church attendance.
Isabelle Hamley:So it's becoming something that's.
Amul Pandya:Why Is that? Just because so few people go that? If it doubles, that actually, oh, it's just a spurious data. If you're bumping between half a percent and one percent of the population, a doubling sounds like quite a dramatic thing, but it's just normal. Half a percent and one percent of the population a doubling sounds like quite a dramatic thing, but it's just normal. Or do you sense a genuine potential early green shoots of revival amongst the younger generation?
Isabelle Hamley:I. I think that with hyper modernity or post-modernity or hyper modernity has taken us to a fairly hopeless place. If you keep deconstructing everything, deconstructing everything that's good in the world, deconstructing every interaction and interpreting it as an interaction of power, what do you end up with? You end up with something really hopeless about the world. If you reduce every human person to just a biological or a chemical process, you lose so much of who we are. And I think we've got to a stage in the west where a new generation is saying there's got to be more than this. You know, there's got to be more than scientific reductivism. Not all scientists are reductivist.
Isabelle Hamley:I'm married to a scientist. He's not a reductivist, but I think there has been a trend to being very reductive about what it means to be human and reducing the whole of reality to what human beings can understand or see or touch. But of course, why would we? There's lots of things we may not be able to see or touch or explain. It doesn't mean they're not there. And I think there's a new generation that is more open to saying actually there's got to be more than what we've reduced life to. Otherwise, why is life worth living? And I think that's some of the conversations I have with younger people. I have an 18-year-old daughter. We have those conversations together. There is this sense of openness, at the same time as a healthy suspicion of the excesses of I was about to say religions, but I would say it's ideologies in the past. I think human beings have a gift for turning something good into something.
Amul Pandya:Tribal we have a tribal instinct, tribal.
Isabelle Hamley:So I think you can see that, but I don't think that's specific to religion. You know, marxism um has turned out stalin. You know on mao in the same way that you've had, or so I think any ideology can be perverted in a sense. But I think in young people there is that sense of we need to hope in something bigger than ourselves.
Amul Pandya:Marxism, one can argue, is a kind of radical next logical step of Christianity, because it's steeped in that the first should be last, last should be first and the meek shall inherit the earth. And there's that, even though it's marx was quite keen to drop, um, you know, the spiritual side of his belief is his ideology. It was. There is a strong argument to say actually this is just. Marxism versus capitalism are basically it's a form of religious war for the 20th century, 21st century versus you know the previous religious wars we had.
Amul Pandya:And it's actually why fascism is so appalling to us, because in a way that communism isn't because fascism is kind of anti it's going back to that kind of civic, ancient world of strength. Morality lies in strength. And we find that more appalling than communism where, like, yes, people died, but actually it's in that spirit of finding equality.
Isabelle Hamley:Yeah, I think. I mean I've reflected a lot on that. I've come from a family of people who are all very ardent socialists.
Isabelle Hamley:Voters my grandfather was the archbishop used to joke that I was a Marxist family of people who are all very ardent socialist voters. My grandfather was the archbishop used to joke that I was a Marxist, and I used to tell him no, no, no, no. I need to introduce you to my grandfather. Next to him, I'm Boris Johnson, you know, but definitely not, and I think there are a lot of things I value about Marxism, and I think there's a lot of analysis that Marx got right about society and about what happens with capital in particular. When you no longer have access to capital, in a sense, and you can only sell your labor, you're automatically disadvantaged.
Isabelle Hamley:I think that's non-controversial, almost, but I'm not sure. Marx managed to give good, constructive solutions, and for me, one of the things that's lacking in Marxism is an acknowledgement of the uniqueness of each person and the fact that every person has something different to offer and that pursuing different ways in life is not a bad thing. And so there's something really interesting about yes, there was that radical equality of people, but as a Christian theologian, I believe in radical equality and radical diversity held together, and I feel like Marxism doesn't have that. It's got the equality bit but doesn't do the diversity bit.
Amul Pandya:And it sort of elevates science to this sort of status that it was never meant to have, I mean in the kind of western. What I mean by the science in this for this conversation, is the western scientific method that came out of the enlightenment, not that science is happening around the world in different ways and shapes and forms.
Amul Pandya:But what I mean is this sort of you know, hypothesized test repeat works had had christian origins in that, you know, the the world has been created under a set of laws and we've been allowed to go and find out what those laws are. But it feels like the explanatory load on science has just been ramped up to force people to try and understand the world in ways that that hypothesized test repeat can't do. And you're left, as you're alluding to. You're left with this vacuum where you think well, I'm just rational, I'm just a logical person, I'm a scientific person, I don't believe in spirit.
Isabelle Hamley:Yeah, but there's so much that science cannot explain. Yeah, yeah, and we don't want the god of the gaps either. So I don't want just to believe in god, because god fills the gaps of what I can't explain. But but to me there is something about saying there is more to life than what human beings can understand. There is more to life than life than what the Western world kind of imagines there is, and I think the Western world has had its imagination constrained, as it were.
Amul Pandya:When I interact with other cultures that are not so steeped in that kind of science base, you see people that have an imagination that takes them to to bigger and broader places than where we are well, I think that's really resonates with my thoughts on the economy and kind of um, livelihoods of people, because we do feel like you ties into your hopelessness point and the lack of imagination, the lack of therefore risk-taking, because you don't have anything to look forward to to drive you forwards, and so you're kind of in this. You know, where you and I differ is I'm probably a bit less Marxist, a bit more capitalist, but you have this sort of well, you know, effectively you're consigned to welfarism, because what's the point? You?
Amul Pandya:know of going out there and thinking of the world in a different way, because you've lost hope and faith and and, and I would therefore like to pivot to your work on mental health, because, if you're my understanding of mental health and I'm certainly no expert and maybe I maybe I'm even skeptical as to whether an expert can exist in something so complicated but happiness is not a is not a thing that you strive for. It's a kind of byproduct of having, um, an aim or a journey that you go on, and if you're striving for a standalone, kind of snapshot, static happiness, you're doomed to fail yes, so to give and therefore that what we've been taught to strive for happiness and because it's unattainable.
Amul Pandya:People are just therefore depressed or they can't cope, they can't function in a complex world. My, my, you, you know pro-science approach to mental health, therefore, is you know you need to give people something to strive for and then the happiness will follow. Can you talk about your work on mental health and couched in that kind of in that context?
Isabelle Hamley:So my work on mental health comes out first of my own experience of struggling with mental health and then coming alongside others who do, of struggling with mental health and then coming alongside others who do and have just developed an interest in spirituality and mental health and how spirituality interacts with mental health and how churches can become good hospitable places for those who struggle. If you're a vicar in the Church of England, often your vicarage is next door to the church and I think with the structures of support in the NHS kind of gradually falling apart, you get more and more people knocking on the door of the vicarage next to the church who are struggling with their mental health, because people know that the vicar will be there in a way that you can't go and knock on the door of the NHS and get a quick response in the same way. So there's something really interesting about what's happening in terms of community mental health actually and mental health care More widely. I've recently written an article about happiness actually in the Hebrew Bible, in the Psalms, and how we understand happiness, and I think I do say somewhere in the article something very similar to what you said, which is happiness is what happens when you're busy doing other things. You know that it's not something that you can just capture, but I think what's interesting is that I wonder how much or why the society kind of you know, the contemporary world is actually at fault for creating some of the crisis in mental health that we have by creating partly false expectations of what life is like.
Isabelle Hamley:So, you know, if I read the old Christian scriptures, what I see is that the imagination of what life is like is life won't always be easy, but that there can be things that are valuable within it, that you can strive for a good life, even in a life that has challenges. And there's a really interesting kind of mix of happiness is partly some of what you choose to make out of your life and it's partly random. And so there's a real realism, I think, in the Bible about happiness, together with a sense that happiness is about the small things of life. It's about home, it's about food, it's about, you know, safety, comfort, relationships, meaning. But I think we live in a world that doesn't tell us that. We live in a world where, on social media, happiness is being like some celebrity who's photoshopped and only posts the good things of life.
Isabelle Hamley:I have a real dislike of some of what we hear in school assemblies, for instance, that our children are told you can be anything you want to be just if you work hard enough, and it's like that's not true, is it? None of us can be anything we want to be. I will never be an Olympic runner, no matter how much I train, but that doesn't mean I can't have a happy life. But it feels like our society is creating an imaginary universe that's actually not helping, because we're saying to our children you should be happy, happiness is a right and you must always be happy. And if you're not happy, happy there's something really wrong. But actually not feeling happy all the time is not wrong. In a sense, that's part of the human condition. It's a signal.
Amul Pandya:It's a signal yeah because do you think like the? The words happiness is obviously you know and well-being, contentment, these things have replaced words that we never hear anymore, such as duty or loyalty or mission. I mean, again, these are very, very religious terms, coming from someone who's you know. But when you don't have something to strive for which is beyond yourself, which isn't just about me being happy, something to strive for which is beyond yourself, which isn't just about me being happy, it's something you're, you're, you're, you're always going to be chasing the next, bigger car, bigger house, better photo, more likes.
Amul Pandya:You know, and this is where I I, you know, if I was to be a critic of the of the church, I feel maybe they haven't filled that vacuum which I feel kind of big government, the big state, the, the nhs is kind of, you know, centralized, monopolized education, you know where, which has replaced what the church used to do, what communities used to do, has not, you know, sorry to say this to a potential mark marxist, I'm not a Marxist and that's why I would agree with you.
Isabelle Hamley:I'm not convinced that the big state is actually necessarily helpful, and certainly I think one of the things we lack is communities. It's small communities, meaningful communities. One of the things I find really interesting in my study of happiness in the kind of scriptures was the sense in which individual happiness was always connected to community happiness. So the extent to which an individual could be happy is always dependent on how far the community they're part of actually thrives and that if you're happy but your community isn't, there's almost something wrong.
Isabelle Hamley:So there's there's that sense of interdependence of all human beings is really important and I think nestedness which yes and we have lost some of that and I think that's you know, and instead what we do is we over medicalize mental health and then we over individualize it. Now, I have nothing against counselingselling and therapy I've received it, it's been deeply helpful for me but I worry that some of the causes of the lack of wellbeing in our society are actually social causes. They're about the way we organise ourselves.
Amul Pandya:They're about yeah, 100%, you know.
Isabelle Hamley:But our solution is an individual solution and it's like you know that doesn't quite work. Kind of giving more and more individual time to a person is probably you know what it might help, like put a plaster on something it's not going to help solve no, because you you have, you have your therapy and you have your pills and whatever.
Amul Pandya:But then you still go back and the fact you got two kids under four who you know. You're working full-time and you're juggling parenting and you know you can't ask your grandparents the program for more help again. You don't have anyone to share the bed. Yeah, it's like you go back.
Amul Pandya:You have all the therapy you want, but the fact that there's no community to go back to after the session and I, you know, maybe do you feel, for example, that the church of england maybe missed a trick in, let's say, covid, when there was kind of a lot. I remember in lockdown, I was living in london and to go anywhere you walked past we, our flat was just off the the square.
Amul Pandya:In the middle of the square was a church where we got married and it was just weird seeing it shuttered and I felt if there was an opportunity for the Church of England to kind of re-establish itself as a focal point, it was during a pandemic where it could have gone look we, we get the lockdown thing. We're not scientists, but we're going to have a safe space where we're going to actually be open. Yeah, and I don't know, it felt like a missed opportunity to me and rather than just following the government line, we're all just going to shut down. And I remember we got married just after COVID and the Church of Wales had said that people are allowed to sing hymns at their wedding, but the Church of England hadn't quite caught up and so we had this sort of hymn playing and we had to sit. You were allowed to stand up and it was just like come on, guys, you know if you're not going to lead on this, and yeah, it's difficult, isn't it?
Isabelle Hamley:hindsight is a wonderful thing I I'm not sure I should say this publicly, but I, you know, I still have doubt as to whether lockdown was actually a good thing, because I think that you know the long-term effect, particularly on our children is, is so high that but but that's very easy to say afterwards. And how do you, how do you kind of judge the balance between the lives that would, you know, the additional life that would have been lost had we not gone into lockdown, and the level of disruption and you know, not just disruption to personal lives but actually geopolitical disruption. I think the way the world has kind of moved post-COVID is partly linked to some of what happened in the pandemic. So I hear exactly what you're saying. I don't have an easy answer. I wasn't part of the decision-making at the time because I got COVID really badly just before we went into lockdown. I became ill a few days before we went into lockdown and then was off work for six months because I was so ill. I don't know what the answer is. I think I'm French.
Amul Pandya:Therefore, quite I'm skeptical of very strong imposition of things One size fits all and it's very. You know, I got the first lot. I don't want to really escape lockdown policy here.
Isabelle Hamley:No.
Amul Pandya:The value for listeners of your time. But you know I got the first lockdown. You know we didn't know what this thing was, who did it affect? And there were no vaccines and all of that. But again, this is where science, the burden on the scientific method, was just too much. How can they make that calculation of the long-term impact on children who don't see their parents' faces, or they don't go to school or they don't get to play with other children, versus people who could have isolated and who felt vulnerable, versus people who?
Isabelle Hamley:could have isolated and who felt vulnerable. I think part of it for me was the reduction of human beings to physical. Health is everything, but actually a human person is more than just a body. A human person is spirit, soul, mind, all of that and actually the impact of isolation, particularly on people living on their own or very old persons. It felt like we forgot to talk about the whole person.
Amul Pandya:Yeah, because we followed we basically, when it was kicking off, we didn't know what to do, no one knew. But the CCP, where it started, took one approach and we all kind of fell in line, barring sweden, um. And it was like I can understand, if you've got a hardline communist, very data-driven, you know, health, yes, physical approach to a non-spiritual approach to how you run a country, then that was the logical thing to do. But it felt like the West again. I don't want to be too end of empire or too kind of declinist, but we just kind of lost our self-belief a little bit.
Isabelle Hamley:We did and at the same time you know, the narrative about the pandemic is still we went into lockdown and we worked from home, but actually less than 50% of the working population went into lockdown. So actually the majority of people still had to go to work because if you worked in the food chain, in the sanitation industry, doctors. So I think there's something really interesting about the narratives we tell ourselves about what happened during the pandemic.
Amul Pandya:And how do you? So what do we do now? Then I guess, if you were, if you, if you were, if you were archbishop, with all the power to tell everyone what to do, um, how do we get from sort of have you heard of the church of england problem in in? Have you heard of this phrase? It's a, it's. It's something I've heard a few times now in kind of business circles. So I'll give you an example jaguar, the car company did this very, um, very controversial branding, uh, advert, advert.
Amul Pandya:we didn't have a car in it, but it had lots of sort of sort of sort of transgender models in it and this, that and the other, but there was nothing about the car whatsoever and it's sort of like think, think different type thing and it caused a lot of stir and people were talking about it a lot and one of the analysis of it was that, you know, jaguar is a brand that has it's got a lot of brand value in people's minds but no one actually buys it.
Amul Pandya:And people like the idea of you know a Jaguar, but it was described as having a Church of England problem. People like to know it's there, but are they actually going to go? Probably not, but if it wasn't there they'd probably quite regret it. And it chimes in with this notion of being a cultural Christian. Well, I actually quite like going to a carol service on 12th of December and maybe I'll do something at Easter, but forget going to kind of evening prayers on tuesday um so, which is not a bad starting point or a platform.
Amul Pandya:But you know, church attendance was something like 12 million in 1980. It's now about 600 000, are we?
Isabelle Hamley:yeah, maybe these green shoots are coming just because the need is there yeah, because the need is there, but also there's I think there's a challenge to the church of england to think what does it mean to reinvent yourself in a, in a culture where people are less tied to the local? How you don't, you know? Because at the time when people were less geographically mobile, when you didn't move as much, the church as hub in the community was much more significant. So there was a cultural belonging that went with going to church, with seeing people. That's not there anymore. So what does that look like today? But I think that comes with another challenge, which is where is church merely about being relevant? Because I think in some churches the temptation is to just mimic all the ways in which wider culture does stuff, and so I will come to church and you'll have something, a language and a way of doing things that's familiar, but then are we losing the essence of what church is really about?
Amul Pandya:And I found this I have to to confess, when I have tried to go I don't, I don't really want to hear from the on the on. You know this is me personally from the, from the, from the minister giving the sermon about net zero or israel, palestine or transgender issues. I, I'm not. I get that all day outside of the church. I want to come here because of me, selfishly, but kind of spiritual sort of nourishment.
Amul Pandya:How do I live a better life? How do I kind of cope with the next week? And I felt one criticism of the Church of England I've seen out there kind of resonated with my experience was it was too ready to jump on the kind of trendy bandwagon and it lost the kind of. Actually there's a character. It's quite interesting. There's a character I don't know if you've read Wilkie Collins it's kind of one of the first sort of crime fiction writers.
Amul Pandya:Yes, yes, In the Moonstone, which is a great book, a great story, where there's a character called Gabriel Betteridge who's obsessed with Robinson Crusoe. So, anytime he feels this sort of like something's happened in the crime, in the whodunit, he goes. Oh, this is an interesting situation. Let me go to Robinson Crusoe. He goes to a random page and he sort of finds meaning in the kind of it's just like and it.
Amul Pandya:It's kind of that. That's what kind of hermeneutics is meant to be. It's what the bible was meant to be, where you kind of gave you. I felt like maybe it's lost that spirituality.
Isabelle Hamley:Going back to the text versus trying to kind of, you know, catch the next prevailing trend there's something interesting there which is about the inner and the outer life of the church that in the inner life of the church, catch the next prevailing trend. There's something interesting there which is about the inner and the outer life of the church that in the inner life of the church, talking about net zero for our buildings is important. I think doing something to make our buildings more sustainable is part of our life. Thinking about how we select priests and how we do that in a way that doesn't reinforce racial prejudice, I think that's important. How do we do that?
Isabelle Hamley:And I think the Church of England is in that kind of space where we need to kind of talk about these things and we need to talk about them in the way in which we organise ourselves as a church, because that's important. We need to possibly have a voice when we're in the eyes of lords or whatever. But at the same time, how do we do that in a way that doesn't obscure the main thing and the primary thing that we're about? And I think at times we've probably kind of got that wrong and we've let particularly our own internal debates overtake kind of everything else that we have to talk about and we've kind of lost the plot a bit. I'm talking about the most important stuff.
Amul Pandya:Well, let's do it now. Can we talk about judges?
Isabelle Hamley:Whether other people would argue it's the most important is interesting.
Amul Pandya:I think you know we're seeing a residence, a revival of interest in these stories, because they kind of they. Whether you believe in the, the metaphysical side of it, or not, they, they have the. The narrative enables you to understand the world in a way that data kind of just doesn't quite cut it. I'm afraid in data's got its role and I'm in my profession.
Amul Pandya:It's very important, but when you're navigating complexity as an individual, you need stories to kind of help guide you, even if you don't know they're guiding yet, um, and so we are seeing a recognition of that again, perhaps, um, and what's interesting to me is that you've um taken a particular interest in the Old Testament versus the New Testament. I'm not saying you're not interested in the New Testament, but like and particularly in in Judges and Ruth, and I thought it'd just be a good opportunity. If people don't know it, I didn't know about it most people don't, even people who go to church regularly let's start with Judges.
Amul Pandya:Let's take it in order. I know that the Judges came first and Ruth came second. That's at least what's the start. Let's talk about the book of judges. Um, what happened? What is it about?
Isabelle Hamley:so. So in the story it's part of what's called the histories in the old testament, so you're kind of talking about the origins of of israel, kind of spiritually as much as as in any other way, and so it tells the story of the people of Israel arriving into the Promised Land and starting to settle, cohabiting with the initial inhabitants and trying to become a thing.
Amul Pandya:So it's after Moses. It's after Moses and it's before David.
Isabelle Hamley:Comet of Egypt, kind of you know, comet of the desert. Try to find space. You know, you need to remember this is an agricultural society. If you don't have land you die because you don't get food. So, trying to find space, a lot of the good space is already taken in the land and they're settling, they're having skirmishes with local populations, but they're also trying to start to gel as a nation.
Isabelle Hamley:I mean, nation is a bit of an anachronistic term, but what does it mean to be Israel? Because Israel was a concept. Actually, concept and reality often don't match. So there's something really interesting for me in terms of identity, in terms of the struggle between the ideals we strive for and the reality of life on the ground and the stuff that gets in the struggle between the ideals we strive for and the reality of life on the ground and the stuff that gets in the way of the ideals and what it means to live together as a community and Judges it's messy.
Isabelle Hamley:I mean it's one of the messiest books of the Bible. It's got some of the most terrible stories in the Bible as well, which I like because it says this is real life. You know, faith isn't about pie in the sky when you die. It's about how do we make sense of where we are, how do we make sense of who we are, how do we find our way into a world that is never going to be perfect, but where there is hope nonetheless. That's part of the message of judges for me, and there's great stories everybody's flawed in the book of judges just about, and there's an exploration of leadership, what it means to lead and the achilles heels of leadership. So we have of leaders, most of whom have got serious issues, but there's almost a compassionate look at those issues.
Amul Pandya:In the brutality, in the brutality of it.
Isabelle Hamley:Often you see a thread of why it is that those people became who they are. There's also a thread in Judges that's about the joint responsibility of people and leaders. So Israel chooses its leaders. It's not quite democracy, but neither is it autocracy, and there's no kind of kingship passing on to your children, and there is a sense in which the people get the leaders they deserve and leaders are able to do what they do because people give them the power to do that. So's something about, you know, which often we don't talk very much about in western society, but that actually you can't just blame leaders and make them scapegoat.
Amul Pandya:there's a there's a joint responsibility for the life of the nation and there's a kind of cycle, isn't there, where you know you're in the promised land, you're all believers and things are going well, and then the judge dies, and then the followers start becoming idolatry. Yeah, they lose their faith.
Isabelle Hamley:They do this, they follow.
Amul Pandya:Baal, and then they descend and then they end up becoming oppressed and then another judge comes along and frees them, and then they start again, and it's kind of goes on. I was like, oh, here we go again, oh, here we go again. It was kind of quite interesting. Um, what is there something in that cycle that that that must talk to human nature, kind of through and through?
Isabelle Hamley:yeah, it's the, it's the usual, it's the mark twain thing, isn't it? History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes and there's that sense of I think there is something about very early on in the book that talk about the new generation did not know the Lord, and it's that sense that actually every generation has got to learn how to live for themselves. They've got to learn faith for themselves. They've got to learn, and often that's done through mistakes and problems and issues and suffering, and we don't really like that as human beings.
Isabelle Hamley:But there is that constant. Well, you have things to learn from those who came before, but equally, each new generation has got to learn for themselves. You can't just take something ready from from the past and apply it in the present because you kind of you go through a period of time.
Amul Pandya:It's similar to that kind of historical trope. It's like yeah clogs on the way up, silk slippers on the way down, and um, what's? What is interesting is that you get through this period of suffering and then you arrive, and then, all of a sudden, you forget the next generation, forget the lessons and have to go through it themselves. Can you talk about Deborah and jail? What happened there within the book of Judges?
Isabelle Hamley:So Deborah, the story of Deborah, this amazing story about a woman who was leading Israel, people don't like that. I think a lot of commentators are finding Deborah really difficult because they don't know what to do with her, because she's a woman leading in a man's world and the text doesn't bat an eyelid. It's like, yeah, she's a woman, she's a judge and she doesn't do anything wrong and, like many of the other judges that's quite extraordinary at this point do anything wrong and like many of the other judges, and that's quite extraordinary at this point. What I find interesting about deborah is she leads together with a man called barack, who's subordinate to her, but she doesn't try and take over his job. He's the leader of the army and he doesn't try to take over her job, which is to give advice, to hear from god. She's the brains and it's like there's no, there's no sense of competition, there's this sense of they work together. Often commentators haven't liked that and have tried to say no, no, you know, deborah was only a leader because Barak didn't step up, which is clearly not true, because Deborah was a leader before Barak even enters on the scene. So there's something quite extraordinary about this story of a woman in the patriarchal world who just leads and does a great job, and that's it. And then you've got the story of Yael, which is she's part of. She's not.
Isabelle Hamley:So. Israel is at war. Basically they were oppressed by the local people. The local army of Canaanites kind of tries to overrun Israel when Israel rises against them. And then you've got this liminal figure whose husband is an ally of the Canaanites and as a woman in a country at war, she's at risk. She knows, you know, what happens to women in war. It's the same the world over. And then the enemy general, the Canaanite general, arrives and she has to make a choice. What's going to happen? Are the Israelites going to win? If the Israelites win, and she's helped the Canaanites, she'll be at risk. But if she refuses to help the Canaanites, what is he going to do to her? So he's arrived.
Amul Pandya:He's run away from battle.
Isabelle Hamley:Cicero, cicero, is that how you say it?
Amul Pandya:Cicero, cicero, he's run away from battle and he's gone back to.
Isabelle Hamley:he's come to some tent To some tent and he's hoping to be helped and she lures him. So it's a you know with her feminine guise, as I would say, it's quite a spicy story. He's got lots of sexual innuendos she lures him, gets him to sleep and then kills him with a tent peg and a hammer and a tent peg and it's quite graphic and it's quite violent and again we have a non-typical woman who actually is.
Isabelle Hamley:She's non-Israelite and she's a woman and she's one of the reasons why Israel is delivered from oppression. So that's a really interesting story because it collapses lots of categories, it collapses some of the ideas we have about gender, but it also says well, actually God works with everybody and it's that sense of god is on the side of the oppressed, rather than god is on the side of this tribe or that tribe or that people you know, and and that there is that sense that you know. Faith is about faith in the god who cares, yeah, about those who are vulnerable, rather than faith is about having a guarantee for what I want.
Amul Pandya:And what can we learn from Samson, who's also in that book of Genesis, samson?
Isabelle Hamley:is a complete disaster. He's a man-child who cannot control his impulses. Again, there is something really interesting about. So. I'm interested in identity and how identity works. And in the story of Samson there is this sense of he's part of Israel but he resists and Israel is, you know, in that uneasy relationship in the middle of Canaan.
Amul Pandya:But Samson is he's got superhuman strength. Is that right?
Isabelle Hamley:Yeah, but he's irresistibly attracted by everything Canaanite, particularly women, and so is he a leader of Israel or is he a leader for Canaan? How do you do the right thing? And can you do the right thing by mistake, which is what happens with Samson. He kind of ends up in the right place, but not by making the right kind of choices. He does have superhuman strengths, but he starts to trust in himself and think that all the things he does are because he's brilliant and he's a great person, rather than seeing that his strength is given to him by God rather than something he can possess.
Amul Pandya:Yes, Like you see, whether you're an influencer or a successful business person. Stroke depressed person when it comes to the evenings, because you kid yourself about your own skills that you think are innate, but they may actually be God-given or may have a purpose beyond showing off or collating money actually be god-given or may have a purpose beyond showing off or collating money. Um a much shorter uh book is ruth, which comes after um, which, again, is an area of interest of yours um, why what?
Isabelle Hamley:actually? Tell us about the book of ruth and then tell us why you think it's interesting. So the book of re Ruth is a beautiful little book. It's very, very short, one of the shortest books of the Old Testament, and it's the story of two women, basically Ruth and Naomi. Naomi, kind of married, moved out of Israel, has her sons married outside of Israel and Ruth is her daughter-in-law and Naomi's two sons die and Naomi is absolutely destroyed by that, by that grief of her mother, and she tells Ruth well, go back to your people, I'll go back to mine. And then Ruth says no, I will come with you. And she chooses to love her mother-in-law and they both go back to Israel.
Isabelle Hamley:And, to cut a long story short, ruth finds her husband in Israel, settles and becomes the Gentile mother or grandmother of King David, in the lineage of David and then in the lineage of Jesus actually. And it's a really interesting story because Ruth comes from these despised people, the Moabites that Israel detests and they're told never have anything to do with the Moabites, and then Ruth becomes this figure of faith and this ancestress of King David. So it's like turning on its head a lot of concepts within Israel about purity and kind of ethnic, kind of barriers, and so it's bringing in a universality which becomes the kind of ethnic, kind of barriers, and so it's bringing in a universality which becomes?
Amul Pandya:the kind of foundation for monotheism or Judeo-Christian kind of.
Isabelle Hamley:Yeah, it's that sense that God is bigger than the tribe and that the work of God is about including the people who choose to come in, rather than having a strict kind of ethnic foundation.
Amul Pandya:So maybe if someone was to pick up the bible for the first time, you would advise start with the book of ruth, because it's nice and short it's got some nice yeah there's a lovely quote in it which I've completely forgotten about. I will. When ruth tells naomi her mother, I will follow you where you go, I would go um.
Isabelle Hamley:Yeah, I can't remember the exact quote but, yes, and that's used, it's used a lot.
Amul Pandya:I've heard this before so again, it's a an example of things existing in our subconscious that we don't know. Yes have an inheritance. So, as you know, I like to end these conversations with something I call the long bet, which, um, is nothing more than tax-free entertainment. But what would the reason is that, were we to sit down again in five years time, you would have made a 10-year prediction today, and we could just see. How's this prediction?
Amul Pandya:going it's something you'd like to happen and or something you think will happen in the world or beyond, or both. So it's just purely a function of tax-free entertainment, and it's just interesting to collate different answers from leaders such as yourself.
Isabelle Hamley:So I've got two things varying in my head. I think my prediction would be having a female Archbishop of Canterbury in 10 years. I don't think we'll have. The next one would be a woman, but I would say OK maybe there's a chance.
Amul Pandya:Do you think you're kind of in line for the big?
Isabelle Hamley:job? Oh, I don't think so, but that would be one If you apply as a joke, that kind of did you well last time. You don't get to apply. You get asked to apply, you get asked. Fair enough there. You don't get to apply.
Amul Pandya:you get asked to apply, you get asked fair enough.
Isabelle Hamley:There's no CV that you sort of send into an inbox. You do have to submit papers that include your religious CV. Okay, so a female archbishop A female archbishop would be one of my predictions. Yeah, interesting, one of my heart's wishes.
Amul Pandya:Well, I would love to say that we've interviewed a future Archbishop on the Meeting People podcast?
Isabelle Hamley:I don't think so.
Amul Pandya:But look, I've taken too much of your time. I really appreciate it. I felt like we, you know, we haven't scratched the surface. We're tapping into some, you know, some of the big issues of our time. So I'd appreciate, you know you sparing a moment to kind of make a dent in that for people listening. So thank you, isabel. Hopefully see you again soon. Thank you, thank you, this has been meeting people. I've been your host, hamil Pandya. This is a podcast produced by Mads Cooper with music composed by Loverman.