Malcolm Guite pt. 2: When Doubt Meets Divine Beauty and Nightingales Lead to a Grail

Good Faith

Religion & Spirituality, Christianity

4.8 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 11 May 2026

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What Can Lead a Weary Soul to the Divine in a Post-Christian World?

Malcolm Guite is back for part two of our chat with him, and this time we go from atheism to awe, from the Psalms to the Holy Grail, and from Keats to King Arthur. Malcolm tells the wild story of how poetry cracked open his imagination and shattered his unbelief, leading him into the living presence of God — then shows why Galahad and the Grail might be the ancient, weird, luminous story our burned-out, disenchanted world needs now.

00:00 - The Sonnet Epiphany 1. Magi

01:28 - Introduction to Malcolm Guite Part 2

03:37 - From Atheism to Wonder

06:27 - Encountering Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale"

12:11 - The Augustinian Idea of Beauty

15:18 - You Are Not the Center of the Universe

20:44 - "Take Up the Tale" A Ballad Introducing Guite's Arthurian Epic

23:54 - Why Does Retelling the Arthurian Legends Matter Now?

25:06 - The Truth of the Wasteland in the Modern World

27:19 - Conclusion and Credits

Listen to Malcolm Guite pt. 1: Does Theology Need an Imaginative Spark to Grasp God's Mystery?

Mentioned In This Episode:

Malcolm Guite's Galahad in the Grail
Malcolm Guite's Epiphany 1 The magi
Malcolm Guite's Sounding the Seasons
C.S. Lewis's Surprised by Joy
John Keats' Ode to a Nightingale
Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippo's The Confessions Of Saint Augustine

Scriptures Referenced In This Episode:

Psalm 145 (1928 BCP)
The Psalms (Coverdale edition) PDF version

Transcript

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0:00.0	So in Epiphany, this is the arrival of the Meiji, the wise men.
0:06.0	They're the first Gentiles to show up to Christ, and that brings me in.
0:10.0	Here we go, the Meiji.
0:12.0	It might have been just someone else's story.
0:15.0	Some chosen people get a special king.
0:18.0	We leave them to their own peculiar glory.
0:22.2	We don't belong.
0:23.4	Doesn't mean a thing.
0:25.1	But when these three arrive, they bring us with them.
0:31.7	Gentiles like us.
0:33.6	Their wisdom might be ours.
0:35.3	A steady step that finds an inner rhythm, a pilgrim's eye that sees beyond the stars.
0:42.3	They did not know his name, but still they sought him.
0:46.3	They came from other where, but still they found.
0:51.3	In palaces found those that sold and bought him but in the filthy stable hallowed ground their courage gives our
1:02.4	questing hearts a voice to seek to find worship, to rejoice.
1:11.6	Welcome to the Good Faith podcast, where friends who follow Jesus help each other make sense of the world.
1:35.6	This podcast is produced by a 501C3 nonpartisan organization.
1:42.6	I'm D.T. Sloughman, Good Faith's, director of content. And you just heard,
1:48.4	Malcolm Gite, read his sonnet, Epiphany One, Magi, a poem about the wise men who come from
1:56.2	otherware. And in finding Christ, they bring the rest of us with them. I couldn't think of a better way to
2:04.3	open this second and final episode in our two-part mini-series with Malcolm Gite, the author of
	...

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