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

30 June 2025

1 min read

Prisons, spotless minds and more

New episodes: prison's impact on families, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and a culture of death.

Nick Jones

Nick is the senior editor of Seen & Unseen.

Female prisoners hug their children who have climbed across a table to them.

Prisoners hug their children during a visit.

PFI.org.

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About this episode

This week, Daniel Bey shares with us four things he's learnt from working with prisoners. Beatrice Scudeler has discovered Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 20 years on and unearths helpful wisdom for her own trauma. Graham Tomlin asks what will stop the culture of death that libertarian Britain has embraced?

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