‘I asked the songthrush about the soul …’

In a wide-ranging conversation Pat Bennett and Pádraig Ó Tuama look at how imaginative, non-dogmatic approaches to the sacred text – similar to how we engage with poetry or art – can open up deeper, more embodied, and more surprising encounters with the divine. Ó Tuama advocates reading the Bible not as a singular message to decode, but as a multifaceted, ‘wild’, participatory narrative that invites questions and emotional response. The text here does not only speak to us, but also reads our lives in return. Some may find this openness to multiple meanings unsettling, seeking a more definitive interpretive framework, yet Ó Tuama and Bennett offer an invitation to rediscover a deep, creative, curious attentiveness to the text as a pathway for encountering God anew in both Scripture and daily life.