Awe and the Sacred

As a child, Todd Gillen's visits to the vaulted ceilings of his local church were filled with bouts of awe that stilled his frayed nerves and sent tingles shivering down his spine. He felt himself in the presence of god.

All that changed on one particular day, when his religious faith dropped away. Since then he has spent most of his life searching for ideas and theories of god that match what he feels and his experience of his own spirituality.

As a professional archaeologist, he has spent the last 15 years reading, writing, breathing and actually digging up ancient Egypt in pursuit of the sacred. The Egyptians invented formal religion as we know it, and in the desert sands you can see the literal remains of the birth of god. The colossal pyramids, temples and tombs that have captured our popular imagination are testament to the role of awe in that process.

Join Todd as he shares his humanist perspective on god, spirituality and the sacred and asks: what new ways of understanding god are emerging in a world of increasing diversity of belief, what role does awe play in our spirituality, and how can we curate the sacred in our lives?