Talking to Animals

What this episode covers

Brian Scarffe and Sebastian Morello wander off the paved roads of modern piety and into the wild of the Christian imagination, where animals are fellow creatures addressed, admonished and occasionally instructed. They explore the serious conviction that creation itself speaks, and that the saints, by holiness rather than technique, learned to listen.The conversation ranges across Scripture, hagiography and medieval cosmology, asking why the ability to converse with animals was once taken as a sign of restored harmony. What was this “language” the saints seemed to master, and what does its disappearance tell us about the modern Christian deafness to the natural world? Imagine a Christianity less enclosed, less managerial, and more porous to the voices of creation. The lads meditate on what we have forgotten, what we have dismissed as legend, and what might yet be relearned if we remembered that the world was once thought to be alive with meaning, down to its feathers and fur.

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