MATTHEW SYED grew up attending a “real happy-clappy” Evangelical church in Reading. Miraculous healing was expected and perceived as regularly occurring; but he is now an atheist. In Sideways (Radio 4, Wednesday), he met scientists exploring the possibility that prayer really can produce miracles.
Dr Joshua Brown, an American neuroscience professor, was diagnosed with an inoperative brain tumour at the age of 30, within weeks after his wife gave birth to their first child, in the early 2000s. A believing Christian, he and his wife drove thousands of miles around the United States, seeking healing at prayer meetings, but eventually perceived the removal of a demon in the small and poor church where their quest had first begun, a few miles from their then home in St Louis.
Seven years later, scans found only scar tissue where his tumour had once been, and he began looking for scientifically robust evidence for the healing power of prayer. His Global Medical Research Institute, despite difficulties raising grant money for its work, has just finished its first randomised control trial on the effect of prayer on pain and anxiety.
The Canadian haematologist Dr Jacalyn Duffin is an confessed atheist who stumbled into the subject when she was asked to review some scans of a patient suffering from aggressive leukaemia. She assumed that the patient was dead and that she was being asked to investigate them because of a lawsuit. It emerged that the patient was still alive, and that Dr Duffin had anonymously been asked by the Vatican to investigate a possible miracle healing in a canonisation investigation.
Dr Ranjana Srivastava, an Australian oncologist and medical ethicist, understood why many patients prayed for healing. She did not object, but expressed the concerns of many when she pointed out that alternative treatments for cancer were a “multi-billion dollar industry”.
Syed acknowledges the “power of belief”, but thinks that miracles are better explained by coincidences and wishful thinking. But his final disavowal of the possibility of miracles felt like a poorly explained cliff-edge at the end of the programme; he never seriously considered the possibility that he might be wrong.
The name Viraj Mendis will ring bells for those with longer memories of Church of England history. The Sri Lankan pro-Tamil left-winger claimed sanctuary in the Ascension, Hulme, in Manchester, from 1986 to 1989, before ultimately being removed forcibly by police and deported.
This interesting example of a podcast moving into the radio schedules was broadcast in five 15-minute episodes in the post-World at One slot (Radio 4, 2 to 6 February), in In Detail. . . Sanctuary: An act of defiance: a much abridged version of a three-hour series produced for BBC Manchester by the current Rector of the Ascension, the Revd Azariah France-Williams (Features, 19/26 December 2025). Contemporary interviews and archive recordings, of Fr France-Williams’s colourful and controversial predecessor John Methuen and others, are woven together to retell an intense and occasionally violent story.