In 2014 I published Sacred Music in Secular Society. It was a kind of therapy for me. Having worked for nearly two decades as a professional singer with choirs such as The Sixteen, Polyphony, The Gabrieli Consort, The Tallis Scholars and St Paul's Cathedral Choir, I had spent the first part of my working life performing high-quality sacred music in both liturgical and nonliturgical settings. When I retired from my full-time singing career to become a priest, chaplain and writer, I had the opportunity to reflect upon the state of sacred music in secular Western Europe, and so I undertook a series of interviews with renowned professional composers, performers, theologians and philosophers to try to understand the relationship between faith, music and secularism in the modern world. There have been many helpful reviews of that work. One positive criticism that I have taken on board is that the book gave no voice to the non-professional listener: someone who listens to sacred music in a concert, in a church service or through any of the varied digital media available. This work seeks to address that omission by interviewing people who have a broad range of interests in three main categories: the arts, the human mind and society, and religious belief, including atheists, church laity (both Protestant and Catholic) and clergy. The chosen interviewees are not representative of Western society or any particular section of it and, indeed, I do not promise a sociological approach, either qualitatively or quantitatively, to analysing data arising from the talks. However, I hope that their musical, artistic, psychological and neurological, as well as theological, interests, however oblique, may be of interest to anyone concerned with the nature of faith and its relationship, in the post-modern West, to music.

Moreover, since the publication of Sacred Music in Secular Society the notion of post-secularism has been more and more at the forefront of my thoughts. Through the interviews with a variety of writers, artists, scientists, historians, atheists, church laity and clergy, it became clear to me that the term post-secular (a term explained in the introduction below) was a more accurate description of the relationship between faith, religion, spirituality, agnosticism and atheism in the West today.