Revisiting Amazing Grace inspires new songs

Today’s musicians capture both the barbaric and the beautiful.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

three folk musicians face the camera across a meadow

Angeline, Cohen & Jon.

John Newton’s Amazing Grace was originally written to accompany his sermon for New Year’s Day 1773 and has become the most recorded and most sung hymn in the world. Last year was the 250th anniversary of the hymn’s creation while next year is the 300th anniversary of Newton’s birth.

The former slave trader who became a Church of England minister and abolitionist, preached his sermon on the theme of God’s mercy as outlined in a biblical passage from the first book of Chronicles. There, King David prays ‘Who am I Lord and what is my family that you have brought me thus far?’ Newton found parallels with his own life, having been saved from sinfulness and a storm at sea.

Among the many events and projects marking the two anniversaries, a folk album entitled Grace Will Lead Me Home may well be one of the most interesting. That is because, while it celebrates the hymn and its legacy, this album also explores “the distance between the world’s most beloved hymn and a most vile and shameful period in history, the trans-Atlantic slave trade”.

As captain of a slave ship when he became a Christian, Newton continued shipping Africans across the Atlantic. Later, he became Curate in Charge at St Peter and St Paul’s Church in Olney, where he befriended William Cowper and wrote the words to many hymns, including ‘Amazing Grace’. Later still, he lent his voice to the abolitionist cause. Despite these tensions in Newton’s life-story, the love that people have for ‘Amazing Grace’, including those who are descended from the slaves that Newton shipped across the Atlantic, became very apparent in a series of interviews conducted as part of the project before the songs forming the album were written and selected.

‘I’m going to hear John Newton preach’ is a key track on the album in which Jon Bickley describes Newton’s transformation from “foul-mouthed drunken sailor” to the captain able to “talk about how Grace can set you free”. In between, however, Bickley notes that the slaves disembark “leaving a trail of blood across the quay” while “the Captain’s in his cabin” writing about grace. Bickley’s songs on the album culminate in a powerful plea for reparations for slavery entitled ‘Sorry’. He writes:

“300 years after the birth of John Newton the road to redemption for those nations who profited from the slave trade looks long and difficult but surely it starts by saying Sorry.”

Bickley collaborated on the album with two musicians who have also played on other recent folk albums exploring the transatlantic slave trade and its legacy. Both Angeline Morrison and Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne played on a project by Reg Meuross entitled Stolen From God, while Morrison had also released The Sorrow Songs, which featured Braithwaite-Kilcoyne, to considerable acclaim. Both artists brought the weight of their study as well as their considerable artistic talents to the Grace Will Lead Me Home project.

Braithwaite-Kilcoyne brought the profound and arresting ‘Press Gang Song’ to the album. This is a resume of what it takes to become a slave trader from a readiness to “sail the fierce sea” to the willingness to “abuse your fellow man lead him shackled in chains”, “brutalise and violate, disregard their cries of pain”, “cast them overboard to a watery grace”, “for when that you do you shall master your trade”. This was the journey taken by Newton in becoming a slave trader.

Morrison, whose ‘Grace will lead me home’ is based on the Christian hope of resurrection, also writes from that perspective in ‘The Hand of Fanny Johnson’ from The Sorrow Songs. There, having noted the universality of death which “comes for the rich and the lowly”, she sings:

“My dear mother said that a funeral is holy,
The sanctified earth receiving the body,
And in the hereafter that’s when we will all be
Remade, entire and whole.”

Stolen from God, while clearly noting and condemning the way in which European Christians viewed the degradation inflicted on others as their God-given route to wealth, also makes some words of Frederick Douglass, a former slave turned abolitionist, writer and orator, central to the song cycle:

“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference… so wide that to receive the one as good, pure and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked… I love the pure, peaceable and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.”

The song ‘Stolen from God’ makes this contrast its central theme:

“God made these hands to hold and caress
He made these hands to worship and bless
He made these hands to hold my own child
God made these hands to be mild”

Yet, those involved in the slave trade:

“You made these hands to blister and bleed
To slave for the white man and bend to his greed
To cut coffee for gentlemen cane for their wives
At the cost of my family’s lives”

As a result, your legacy is “written in blood, everything stolen from God”.

This contradiction in the Christianity that underpinned the transatlantic slave trade is central to the story of Amazing Grace and its legacy (see Bickley’s ‘The choir still sings Amazing Grace’). Newton did come to see the error of his ways and lend his voice to the abolitionist cause in support of those like William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson and Olaudah Equiano. Meuross effectively captures the beginning of this change in a song called ‘Bridgewater’ about an early petition against slavery:

“Reverend Chubb Mr Tucket Mr White
Call on every Christian soul to join the fight
To stand up as a nation ‘gainst this wicked violation
Though it might be bad for trade you know it’s right…
O brother oh brother oh brother
First the tide must turn before the flood”

The Sorrow Songs, Stolen From God and Grace Will Lead Me Home are three deeply moving and challenging albums, with Morrison and Braithwaite-Kilcoyne as the exceptional musicians linking all three, that tackle the history of the transatlantic slave trade, unearthing both incredible tales and uncomfortable truths. The Church is among the institutions that need most to hear and receive the truths and tales these albums share.

Angeline Morrison – The Sorrow Songs (Topic Records 2022)

Reg Meuross – Stolen From God (Hatsongs Records 2023)

Angeline, Cohen & Jon – Grace Will Lead Me Home (Invisible Folk 2024)

Article

AI - Artificial Intelligence

Culture

Digital

3 October 2025

3 min read

Am I a project or a person?

What we lose when we AI tempts us to refuse our limits

Nathan Mladin

Nathan is a Senior Researcher at the Theos think tank. .

A multiple exposure image shows a womans head and shoulders looking ahead, to the sides and above.

Alex Bracken on Unsplash

Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called “godfather of AI,” was recently asked by a Financial Times journalist to consider a future in which human beings live among robots and gradually morph into cyborgs, their lives prolonged by artificial parts and chemical enhancements. His reply was strikingly casual: “What’s wrong with that?” Thankfully, his answer reflects a minority view today, but one that will grow significantly in both plausibility and appeal as the culture of Silicon Valley – animated by transhumanist ambitions and backed by enormous capital and influence – seeps into the ‘social imaginary’ of the West.

In an individualist culture of ‘quantified selves,’ where self-optimization and wellbeing dominate the horizon of desire, it will take little to sell such enhancements, which will be promoted as not merely the means of surviving ‘rogue AIs’ but the way to flourishing.

But this represents a profound distortion of what flourishing has meant across centuries of philosophical and theological reflection: the actualization of our true nature through the practice of virtue (Aristotle) and living in alignment with our proper end (telos), which is communion with God (Aquinas). Once tethered to a moral and spiritual vision of the human person, flourishing is fast becoming a runaway concept, thinned out on the anvil of individualism and moral autonomy, and conflated with the promise of expanding ad infinitum one’s capacities, choices, and life itself. It is precisely this hyperindividualist vision that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has in mind when he speaks of his mission of enabling ‘maximal human flourishing’.

But the ethical and anthropological crisis we are entering cannot be resolved by neuroscience, secular anthropologies, let alone economics alone, but only through engaging with Christian anthropology. At the heart of the Christian faith stands the claim that Jesus Christ is the archetypal human, the “second Adam,” in St Paul’s phrase. Not simply in the sense that he is a morally and spiritually exemplary figure whose ethical teaching we might want to consider. But, more boldly, in the sense that all human beings - past, present, and future - are mysteriously caught up, redeemed and fulfilled in the person of Christ. In his life, work, death, resurrection and ascension, humans are given the ultimate revelation not only of God, but also of what it means to be truly human and flourish. This means, among other things, that our limitations as creatures are not problems to be overcome but gifts to be honoured, the thresholds where God embraces us in grace. Our dependence and vulnerabilities are not defects to be corrected but the very conditions for fulfilling our humanity, in community, through the practices of faith (trust), hope, and love.

Of course, there are distortions and privations that disfigure human life – disease, cruelty, injustice – which rightly summon humanity to acts of repair and resistance. As a product of God-given creativity, modern medicine and its many cures to previously fatal diseases is a huge blessing. But as biotechnology and AI continue to advance, the line between therapy and enhancement, healing and augmentation will likely become increasingly blurred.

Against visions of human nature as infinitely plastic and of human beings as projects of self-invention, the Christian faith offers the liberating message that humanity is created, incorporated and will be fulfilled in Christ. To be human, then, is not to upgrade oneself without end to avoid vulnerability and death, but to be drawn into Christ, who died but was raised to life and glory. It is to find in him, and to practically outwork through His spiritual body, the Church, the measure of true, mutual flourishing, for the sake of the world. Only from this centre can we wisely discern how to receive and harness the gifts of technology without buying into its counterfeit promise of salvation.

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free.
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief

Pledge a gift now