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

7 April 2025

1 min read

Frankenstein, friendship and assisted dying

Revisiting Never Let Me Go, invest in friends, and who will be impacted by assisted dying.

Natalie Garrett

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

A close up of a forehead bearing an ash cross marked on it.

Ahna Ziegler on Unsplash.

This week, Beatrice Scudeler revisits Kazuo Ishiguro’s brilliant novel, Never Let Me Go as the perfect Frankenstein story for today; Tom Dove invites us to visit the Friendship Lab and take risks by investing in our friends; Ryan Rodrigues introduces us to the people he believes will be most affected by legalising assisted dying.

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