Dr Anna Strhan, Lecturer in Religious Studies in the Department of Religious Studies, is to be interviewed about her book, Aliens and Strangers? The Struggle for Coherence in the Everyday Lives of Evangelicals (OUP, 2015) on the BBC Radio 4 programme Thinking Allowed at 4pm on Wednesday 9 November 2016.
Thinking Allowed is a radio discussion programme focusing on the latest social science research. It is hosted by Laurie Taylor, who was formerly Professor of Sociology at the University of York, and was first broadcast in 1998.
Anna’s book is a study of everyday religious lives in London, and examines what it means to hold on to a strong religious identity in a secular city, focusing on a conservative evangelical church, ‘St John’s’. The book describes how members of St John’s see themselves as increasingly countercultural, moving against the grain of wider culture in London and in British society, yet they also take pride in this, and see it as a central element of being Christian. Providing more nuanced understanding of conservative forms of religion than simplistic portraits of evangelical ‘others’, the book opens up new understanding of how evangelicals find ways of negotiating anxieties, sensitivities, vulnerabilities and human frailties that characterize social life more broadly. The book was in the final shortlist of six for this year’s BBC/BSA Thinking Allowed Ethnography Award.
The programme will be available after it has been broadcast on the BBC’s iPlayer at: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qy05