Homebrewed Christianity Podcast

In this episode, we turn to the radical vision of William Blake with brilliant scholar and psychotherapist Mark Vernon. Mark argues that Blake isn't just a historical curiosity—he's a guide for rewilding our humanity in an age of spiritual flatness. We explore how Blake saw the collapse of cultural imagination coming 200 years ago, offering us a way out of what Mark calls the "narrow deadening" of modern life. Blake's answer isn't to retreat from the world, but to cultivate what he calls "innocence"—not naivety, but a kind of perceptual openness that can see angels, spirits, and the infinite in a grain of sand. We talk about his critique of the mechanistic worldview, his understanding of imagination as something that has us rather than something we have, and his deeply orthodox yet mystical Christianity that treats Jesus as the imagination itself. Mark shows us how Blake's "hermeneutics of energy" offers a different way of relating to money, love, death, and the divine—one that moves from possession to partic