Nomad hosts Tim Nash and Jemimah McAlpine sit down with fellow host David Benjamin Blower to talk through his new album – We Really Existed and We Really Did This. It’s a conversation in which David wrestles with faith and theology, and searches for signs of hope in the increasingly chaotic times we live in. As you’d expect from David, it’s a classic, full of deeply reflective, insightful and challenging observations.

Interview starts at 4m 25s

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BOOKS

Sympathy for Jonah: Reflections on Humiliation, Terror and the Politics of Enemy-Love

WEBSITE

Bandcamp

QUOTES

“It’s an album about living in a moment of history which feels like after one paradigm has collapsed, and before another one’s begun – a paper thin moment between worlds. There’s a sort of weird eye of the storm calm about this moment in some respects. It’s also a time of massive tension. It’s a moment of history. The demands of the past (that’s collapsing, and doesn’t want to collapse) are raging at you… Meanwhile you’re also being pulled in the other direction by the demands and imperatives of what the future’s looking like – the huge problems there are and the ways that we’ve created and done things that make the world work completely differently. You can’t dis-invent that. It’s the weird, eerie, quiet stress of this moment in history.”

“When the world doesn’t work like it used to, I think we freak out, we have this existential crisis… you have this big lurch to the right… to try and hold on to a past that’s ebbing away. It’s trying to resuscitate something that’s dying in your arms. Meanwhile the future becomes networked and integrated… and the shadow that looms over all this is that… we’ve created a climate situation that changes everything. We can’t predict what it’s going to do. We’re not sure that we can stop it … so you’re in this frozen panic moment. You’re not compelled to move yet because it hasn’t hit the fan but you also know that it’s upon you so you don’t feel able to carry on with life as normal. That’s part of the picture.”

“You can’t really have newness and life if you won’t have lament… you do hear a lot of talk about it these days… there is this sort of emotional imbalance gradually created over time that we’re not making space for sadness to happen.”