Sarah Irving-Stonebraker: re-enchanting the ahistorical age

In our age of self-invention, we are profoundly disconnected from the history that once gave us identity.

Nick Jones

Nick is the senior editor of Seen & Unseen.

A woman sitting in an empty church talks to the camera and gestures with one hand.

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Sarah Irving-Stonebraker is an Australian historian whose new book Priests of History: stewarding the past in an ahistoric age, says that, in our age of self-invention, modern people are profoundly disconnected from the stories, practises and history that once gave them their identity.

Justin and Belle talk to Sarah about re-enchanting an ahistorical age and about her own journey from atheism to Christianity as a young academic at Cambridge and Oxford in the early 2000s.

Visit Sarah Irving-Stonebraker's web site. https://www.stonebraker.com.au/

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Podcast

Podcasts

Seen & Unseen Aloud

27 May 2025

1 min read

Alex Warren, third spaces, and lessons in leadership

New episode: listen as we explore a chart topper, a hip gym and leading with humility.

Natalie Garrett

Natalie produces and narrates The Seen & Unseen Aloud podcast. She's an Anglican minister and a trained actor.

A singer holding a guitar raises his head with closed eyes.

Warren on stage.

Mike M. Cohen, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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This week, Ed Chan-Stroud explores Alex Warren's song Ordinary for signs of the fundamentals of human longing; Jessica Norman goes to a Third Space gym and thinks about the cost of belonging, and Graham Tomlin was at Pope Leo's inauguration and shares with us what he noticed.