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Nomad Podcast

Brian McLaren - Spirituality at the End of the World (N350)

Nomad Podcast

Tim Nash

Christianity, Faithshift, Deconstruction, Christianmysticism, Religion & Spirituality, Christianspirituality, Progressivechristian, Christian, Religion, Emergingchurch

4.7 • 658 Ratings

🗓️ 11 August 2025

⏱️ 87 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this episode, Tim chats with author and activist Brian McLaren about his new novel The Last Voyage, a provocative and emotionally rich exploration of what might happen when the powerful elite try to escape a dying Earth and build a new civilisation elsewhere.

Drawing on decades of theological reflection and his recent work on collapse and ecological crisis, Brian reflects on what spirituality might look like at the end of the world. Can faith survive without institutions or certainty? What happens when spiritual practices are reduced to survival strategies? Is surrender a form of wisdom, or just disguised defeat? And what does it mean to live meaningfully when the future is fragile and unknown?

After the interview, Nomad hosts Tim and Nick reflect on how Brian’s novel resonates with their own faith journeys—particularly their experiences of institutional loss, their relationship to hope in a time of climate breakdown, and the challenge of staying spiritually open when despair feels like the path of least resistance.

Interview starts at 15m 34s 

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

The

0:07.0

The Welcome back to Nomad Podcast. I'm Tim Nash and this is Nick Thorley.

0:41.0

Hello. How are you, old chap? I'm okay, thanks.

0:43.8

Anything the beloved listener needs to know about your life?

0:47.1

Well, Tim, I have enjoyed celebrating England women's victory in the Euros.

0:53.9

That was joyful. It was incredible. I in the Euros. That was joyful, wasn't it?

0:55.1

It was incredible.

0:55.8

I predicted the opposite.

0:58.2

I feel like I should come clean on this.

1:01.2

I like to think I know a bit about sport, Tim.

1:03.8

Turns out you don't.

1:04.9

No, I did tell a few people.

1:06.8

Unfortunately, it was a few, but now I'm about to tell a lot more, that on the eve

1:10.3

of the tournament, I predicted that England would do dreadfully that they would get knocked out of the group stage and it was time for a new manager. I remember Nick. How wrong I was on every count. And I remember being sort of quite positive about it. It was kind of reverse of how we usually approach tournaments. Yeah, that's true, yeah. I'm usually the one that's like, we're rubbish, we're going to get, you know, going to get dumped out after the group stage.

1:31.6

Yeah.

1:32.3

It was me trying to lift your spirits, you're having none of it, and then we go and win the thing. Yeah. It was incredible, wasn't it? It really was, yeah. Just wonderful. Although in the knockout stages, we were only ahead for four minutes.

1:27.0

Is that right?

1:27.6

Yeah.

1:27.9

Wow.

1:28.7

So we were only ahead in the semi-final in extra time after Chloe Culley scored that penalty. It's all you need, don't it, mate? It's all you need. And great pundits make bad judgments, don't they? Yeah, all the time. All the time. The worst one I ever heard, and I'm not saying he was a great pundit, but there used to be a Norwich fan

2:01.2

Tim called Mick Dennis, who was the chief sports writer or football writer for the Daily Express.

2:08.0

Not a very positive chap. I used to interview him on the Stoke City, etc. podcast because he hated

...

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