Ruth Smith

speaker

216 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 7 May

Ruth Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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In Our Time · Handel's Messiah · 7 May 2026 podcast

Or it could be a really major transition, contrast,

As in, for example, the end of part two, the beginning of part three.

We go from the grandeur of Christ's dominance and triumph over the whole created universe in the Hallelujah Chorus, drums, trumpets, and so on, the whole chorus.

And then we come down to, I know that my Redeemer liveth, the voice of the single individual.

And not only the single individual, but the worms in the body of the individual.

So Jonin's absolutely understood this gift of Handel's for making contrasts.

And yes, it is the words as well as the music.

It's a very communal work, and it's a very generous work.

I'm sorry, this is again the text, but the music bears it out.

I think Messiah can be understood, certainly from Jennings' point of view, as a response to, as the poet John Donne put it, the new philosophy puts all in doubt.

Religious certainties, religious beliefs had been torpedoed from at least three directions.

One is that God had been depersonalised.

Isaac Newton had shown that the universe was not presided over by a God who notices everything we do, but a clockmaker operating by the laws of mathematics who had wound it up remote, transcendental.

So how could such a big God be interested in me or you individuals or in how we lead our lives and therefore how we get saved after death?

Then there was, I suppose one could call it, a new respect for humanitarian morality, measured against which.

How did we think of the God of the Old Testament, who, after all, was also the God of the New Testament, this partial, unjust God who encouraged a rabble tribe coming out of Egypt, probably with pagan views in their spiritual makeup, wandering around in the desert?

This was not a good father figure, was it?

And then there was actual biblical scholarship, which was showing that the Bible was not, after all, directly dictated by God to one person to write down.

It was the work of many different hands.

It had inconsistencies.

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