Revd Dr Miranda Threlfall-Holmes

Team Rector of the St Luke in the City Team Parish, Liverpool

Miranda is a historian and writer. She has a particular interest in encouraging an experimental and experiential approach to both spirituality and Bible reading, and in faith and discipleship more broadly. She can be booked either to speak on these areas from a theoretical point of view, and/or to run a workshop exploring them in a more hands-on way.

As a historian, she is fascinated by how a historical understanding of the development of church doctrine and practice can shed new light on contemporary issues and concerns.

Miranda has been a member of the Church of England's General Synod, and was particularly involved in the debates surrounding women bishops. She is interested in broad issues relating to diversity in the church, and in the theology of difference.

Publications

How to Eat Bread: 21 Nourishing Ways to Read the Bible (Hodder & Stoughton, 2021)
The Prayer Experiment Notebook (SPCK, 2018)
The Little Book of Prayer Experiments (SPCK, 2016)
The Teenage Prayer Experiment Notebook (SPCK, 2015)
The Essential History of Christianity (SPCK, 2012)
Being a Chaplain (SPCK, 2011)
Monks and Markets: Durham Cathedral Priory 1460-1520 (OUP, 2005)

Photo: Keith Blundy

Lecture titles

Difference, Diversity, Deviance: What we Make of Difference
Difference is a major flashpoint in our contemporary world. Too often, religious views are seen as being exclusionary of difference, and functioning to enforce conformity, whether of views or of behaviour. In this talk, Miranda explores a variety of ways in which cultures and societies past and present have conceptualised difference – whether as divine or demonic – and what difference the ways we think about difference make.
Experimenting with Spirituality
The Teenage Prayer Experiment was a blog which became a book in which Miranda and her teenage son, Noah, experimented with different prayer styles and wrote up the results. The book encourages experimentation in prayer, and a version for adults was published by SPCK in April 2016. This talk can be either an interactive prayer workshop, with stations and introduction, or a talk about the book, the writing process, teenagers and prayer.
How to Eat Bread: Nourishing Ways to Read the Bible
The church seems increasingly polarised between a simple, literal understanding of the Bible, and a rejection of it as an outdated, even abusive, text. In this talk, based on Miranda’s bestselling book, How to Eat Bread, we explore how church tradition and even the Bible itself show us a more nuanced view of how the Bible can be read and digested – not as weaponry, but as nourishment. This talk can be tailored to the particular interests of your group. For example, it could focus on ‘How the Bible reads the Bible’; take a historical view; introduce your group to a range of contemporary methods and approaches; or address the question of why on earth we should take the Bible seriously at all in the contemporary world.