Nostalgia Interviews With Chris Deacy

My guest this week is Revd. Edward Owen, Vicar in the South Cardiff Ministry area, the most multicultural area of Wales, who like me did his degree in Lampeter in the early 1990s. We learn that Edward’s grandmother’s brother was Richard Burton and he talks about a photo from when he was aged three of him with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor taken in his grandmother’s front room. We find out how Edward ended up in Lampeter and we talk about the overlap between St. David’s University College and the Church in Wales. We talk about what might be said to comprise the hub of Lampeter and how it has changed but also remained the same, and how Lampeter had a connection which bigger universities lacked. We discuss why nostalgia is important for one’s own development and why Edward has chosen to be an inner city parish priest. He talks about the concept of ‘intentional community’, misremembering the past and our capacity to cling to a past that is not real. Edward identifies the importance of belonging and the