Unabridged Interview: Belle Tindall-Riley

Lee C. Camp (0:00)

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Hello, friends. Lee C. Camp here. You're listening to No Small Endeavor. This is our Unabridged Interview with Belle Tindall-Riley. We had a wonderful visit with Belle in Oxford, England. We had gone over to the UK to tape six interviews, mostly funded by our friends at the Templeton World Charity Foundation. Super grateful for their support in this adventure. The interview with Belle is part one in a three-part series called The Ache, looking at the longing for some spiritual depth beyond mere materialism or the promises of secularism in Western culture. Belle is, in fact, a New Testament scholar. She grew up in Wales at a time of the height of British secularism, when books like Dawkins' The God Delusion was topping the charts. She tells a lovely story about when she was a young kid, and her family were Christians, and were regular churchgoers, that she was asked one day by a neighbor boy whether they go to church, and she immediately lied and said no, because she felt as if the secularism of Britain required her to give such a reply, and that she has subsequently then been, for a long time, something of an anonymous Christian kind of denying that part of herself all the while, doing a PhD in biblical studies. So it's just, first of all, a fascinating personality, and it was lovely to talk to her. And what we talked about with her specifically was her new book, The Sacred Ache, How Mystical Practices Speak to Our Need for Transcendence. And she wrote this book out of her experiences at the 2024 Glastonbury Festival, which is England's, I suppose, largest music and arts festival, one of the greatest and best known in the world, which is also suffused with a lot of various spiritual mystical practices as a part of the music festival in a particular place called The Healing Field at Glastonbury. And so Belle talked to us a lot about the way she's been thinking about what is it, what are the needs, the longings, the ache behind the rise of things like manifesting, tarot cards, witchcraft, and of the sort. It was just a fascinating conversation, and Belle was a wonderful conversationalist. I hope you enjoy. Here's Belle Tindall-Riley.

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Lee C. Camp (4:12)

Belle Tindall-Riley, welcome to No Small Endeavor.

Belle Tindall-Riley (4:15)

Thank you so much for having me.

Lee C. Camp (4:16)

Delightful to get to be here with you in your homelands.

Belle Tindall-Riley (4:20)

In my homelands, although I must say this is not what I'm used to.

Lee C. Camp (4:24)

Into your living room? Yeah. I love your living room.

Belle Tindall-Riley (4:27)

If we could just pretend we're on location at my house, I'd really enjoy that. But this is the fanciest place I've ever recorded a podcast, I think.

Lee C. Camp (4:33)

Yeah, it's pretty fancy for me.

So for everyone listening, we're in Oxford at a manor, Yarnton Manor, which was, I think, built maybe in the early 17th century. And even, you may know this, even part of the Spencer family, which was Princess Di's family, of course. And I don't know that she ever lived here, but apparently it was in her family.