Elizabeth Oldfield (podcaster)

Oldfield has a degree in English and history.^[1]

She worked as a journalist at the BBC, and was Director of Theos, a religious thinktank, for ten years.^[1][2][3]

She is the host of The Sacred podcast since 2017.^[4] Explaining its purpose in Church Times, Oldfield quoted Barack Obama: "If you listen hard enough, everybody’s got a sacred story. . . How did they come to believe what they believe?". She said that this story becomes a glue that perhaps can "mend our broken common life".^[2]

She is the author of the book Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times (ISBN 9781493446971, Hodder/Brazos, 2024).^[4] The title is from a quotation of St Irenaeus: "The glory of God is a human being fully alive".^[3] Anglican priest and poet Rachel Mann describes the book as "part spiritual memoir and part self-help manual".^[3] Mann commends the book to those who appreciated Unapologetic by Francis Spufford, those who "can’t quite give up on the Song of Love despite all the evidence to the contrary".^[3] Anglican pastor Aaron Damiani describes the book as a "lively conversation with poets, social scientists, cultural critics, philosophers, and psychologists".^[5]

Oldfield considers that Spufford's Unapologetic changed the debate about religion and science introduced by New Atheism in the 2000s.^[6] According to Oldfield, Unapologetic shifted the discussion from being about the Big Bang, Biblical criticism, and proofs of God and into the area of feelings: "for almost all of us, that’s what drives not just our metaphysics, but most of our deepest decisions".^[6]