Nostalgia Interviews With Chris Deacy

My guest this week is Professor Douglas Davies, Professor in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University. We learn about his Welsh background and how he has been in Durham for a total of 26 years, including the time he was there as a student. This interview takes a different form to most of the others in this podcast series in that it has less of an autobiographical dimension and it has made me rethink many of the questions at the heart of my research. Douglas discusses the concept of career planning, and its relationship to issues of social class, and why he thinks there is an element of futility to nostalgia as luck and chance are the two great facts of life. He talks about the problem that he has with retrospective ‘what if’ scenarios. Douglas asks whether with nostalgia we are looking for a prelapsarian paradise, ‘the perfect day’ and the desire for patterns and why they are a pathological expression of the drive for meaning. We talk about how people develop their worldviews and