Malcolm Guite: Poet and Priest
On this episode of Meeting Our Moment, Jeremy Begbie talks to Malcolm Guite about faith, poetry, and more.
Click below (or here) to hear Begbie and Guite’s full, unedited conversation, including more detailed discussions of making the familiar strange, reductionism and the Psalms.
Malcolm Guite
Malcolm Guite (PhD, Durham) is a Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge, where he served as Chaplain and teacher in the Faculty of Divinity for 17 years. He is a priest, a poet, and a songwriter, and he travels and speaks regularly throughout the UK and North America. He is the author of Faith, Hope and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination as well as several collections of poems, including Parable and Paradox: Sonnets on the Sayings of Jesus and Other Poems; Waiting on the Word: A Poem a Day for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany; The Word in the Wilderness: A Poem a Day for Lent, Holy Week, and Easter, and Sounding the Seasons.
Extras
Here are some additional moments from Jeremy’s conversation with Malcolm.
Learn More
You can learn more about Guite and hear him read his poetry by visiting his website. Guite’s latest publication, David’s Crown: Sounding the Psalms grew out of praying the daily office during quarantine. He also wrote a series of poems called Quarantine Quatrains during this time.
Guite’s poem, Easter 2020, is published in N.T. Wright’s book, God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and Its Aftermath. Jeremy Begbie and Wright discuss this book in episode one of Meeting our Moment, “Giving Shape to Our Grief.”
Guite argues that “any act of oppression where one set of people oppresses another set of people is a failure of the imagination” and offers Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” as a poem that invites the reader to see daily acts of a father’s love anew.
Throughout the interview Guite refers to the wisdom of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Guite’s book, Mariner: A Theological Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was published in 2018.
The extended interview (audio) concludes with a discussion of Ordinary Saints, a project featuring the work of painter Bruce Herman and composer J.A.C. Reford. You can view Herman’s portrait of Begbie and Guite’s poem, “A Portrait of Jeremy Begbie,” at this site.
Guite and Prof. Judith Wolfe discussed J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis in their DITA10 presentation, Inkings of Heaven. Guite was DITA’s Poet in residence in 2014. These offerings (a concert, readings, preaching, and lectures) are available in podcast form here.