Finn McRedmond

1 month ago | newstatesman.com | Pippa Bailey |Michael Prodger |Finn McRedmond |Megan Gibson

Humans of every religion and none have made pilgrimages since ancient times: for example, the sacred mountain of Tai Shan, 300 miles south of Beijing, has a history of worship dating back to the Neolithic period. Pilgrims sought – and seek – the help of gods, saints and spirits for protection on journeys, spiritual healing or cures for physical ailments, to give thanks, or perhaps to make a political statement.

Jan 16, 2025 | irishtimes.com | Finn McRedmond

Last week Tom Holland, author and host of the Rest is History podcast, and Nick Cave, musician and frontman of eponymous Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, packed out Emmanuel Hall in Westminster, London. The event was titled In Search of Wild Gods and it was, predictably, about how both men came to find and cherish faith. Cave traces his relationship with God to the tragic death of his young son, Arthur.

Jan 15, 2025 | newstatesman.com | Finn McRedmond

Christopher Nolan’s 2020 film Tenet – a journey backwards, forwards and laterally through time – was no triumph by the director’s own exacting standards. It was too much of a head-scratcher for the populist entertainer’s traditional audience and lost Warner Bros at least $50m. Nolan touted his next project to sceptical ears: who was going to watch a sprawling biopic about a physicist with an obscure name and a penchant for quoting the Bhagavad Gita? As it turned out, a lot of people.

Jan 9, 2025 | irishtimes.com | Finn McRedmond

In 2020 Ireland was riding high. Phil Hogan held one of the most powerful portfolios in Europe. Joe Biden – whose love of Ireland was genuine, his desire to court the Irish American vote even more so – was about to be elected president. The European Union had accepted the Irish view on Brexit negotiations. And the unpopularity of Ireland’s policy of neutrality had not yet come to the fore on the Continent either.

Jan 8, 2025 | newstatesman.com | Michael Prodger |Finn McRedmond |Pippa Bailey

There is, says Rochelle Gurstein in her thought-provoking book about the fickleness of artistic taste, “a great deal at stake in being able to feel the continuous, living presence of classic works of art”. A sense of permanence and continuity of experience, of immortality even: the greatest art from the past can save us from being “trapped in the shallows of the here and now”.