Adrian G R Scott

New Miniseries from the Anxious Poet’s Podcast

A combined presentation from the Anxious Poet’s Podcast and Substack.

This is an experiment in imagining what might happen if the Gospel of Mark, written in the first century of the Common Era, were to be set in the 21st century in South Yorkshire and beyond. Oh, and the figure of Jesus is now a woman, a hairdresser from Edlington, an ex-pit town near Doncaster, and she is called Jess Jennings.
In sixteen reports mirroring the sixteen chapters of Mark’s original gospel, I engage in a thought experiment – what I call, in the podcasts, a hermeneutic dialogue between the first-century text and the world as I have experienced it in South Yorkshire in the twenty-first century.
I originally published this under the title of the Mark Widdowson Blogs in 2013, recounting the experiences of a fictional journalist and his encounter with Jess Jennings, the hairdresser from Edlington. In 2025, I decided to rewrite it and make it an audio experience on my podcast, in conjunction with publishing the texts on my Substack. Each podcast features a reading of one report or chapter, followed by a short commentary on the text and its original counterpart, using a number of relevant texts from my theological library, gathered during my studies.