Katherine Rundell: belief

Transcript context

…A number, yes. This is a podcast. [laughs] Okay, I’m going to say 70 percent of people found . . . if you read the letters that we have of the time, people are often, in their private lives, expressing very real comfort and hope from certain forms of religious doctrine. The amount of knowledge that people would’ve had, what the Bible actually said, the amount of access people would have had to Bibles in English, was of course, very limited. But I think a lot of people believed because it was offered as a way to put down your anxiety, your hopes, your chaos. It was a structure that gave people purpose and meaning. Then, of course, I think there will have been a lot of people who went to church — it was against the law not to go to church — but who went to church out of conformity, out of duty, out of not really caring that much. I’m sure, in every church service, there were the passionate devotees and the people who were thinking about lunch — as there are now. For Donne, can the meaning of a suicide ever be truly transparent?…

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