released 2/23/2024

To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death, martyred when he was in his late 80s. His friend Marcion (not the heretic associated with gnosticism) wrote a letter about the martyr’s death to the church at Smyrna, and it is this letter on which Redford and Cairns’s oratorio is based. Redford discusses his meditating on the balance of evil and good as he struggled with how to depict it rightly in the work, and Cairns describes how the sweetness of the letters infused his life as he dwelt with them.

15 minutes

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