Ursula

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Hypocrisy, Virtue, Gluttony, Temperance, Justice and Prudence

Toby Jones and Vanessa Onwuemezi reading Lucy Sante’s Six Sermons for Bob Dylan

  • 24 July 2025

To celebrate the publication of Six Sermons for Bob Dylan—Lucy Sante’s unclassifiable collection of secular-sacred homilies composed at the request of Dylan, Sante’s fan and sometime patron—the book’s publisher, Tenement Press, recently hosted a reading at the Old Church, London, the oldest surviving Elizabethan church in the city. Sante’s ‘sermons’ were delivered from the pulpit by actor Toby Jones and writer Vanessa Onwuemezi. Here, for your late-summer sanctification, Ursula proudly presents the unabridged recording from the event. Hallelujah!

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Lucy Sante’s books include Low Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), Kill All Your Darlings (Verse Chorus Press, 2007), The Other Paris (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015), Maybe the People Would Be the Times (Verse Chorus Press, 2020), and the memoir, I Heard Her Call My Name (Heinemann, 2024). 

Toby Jones is one of the most acclaimed and prolific actors of our times, working internationally with equal success in cinema, theatre, and on television and radio. His leading performance in 2024's Alan Bates vs the Post Office (ITV) was central to that dramatization’s remarkable and ongoing public and political impact.  

Vanessa Onwuemezi is a writer living in London. She was the winner of The White Review Short Story Prize, 2019 and her work has appeared in literary and art magazines, including Granta, Frieze and Art Review. Her debut short story collection, Dark Neighbourhood, was published in 2021 and was named one of the Guardian’s Best Books of 2021. She was the inaugural writer in residence at the Roberts Institute of Art residency, 2023, and Scholar of Note at the American Library in Paris, 2024. 

Gareth Evans is a writer, curator, producer, publisher and event host. He works on special projects for the London Review of Books. He has co-written the film Wayfaring Stranger (Andrea Luka Zimmerman, IFF Rotterdam 2024) and produced Schneewittchen (Stanley Schtinter, IFF Rotterdam 2024). 

Tenement Press—a house for homeless ideas—is an occasional publisher of esoteric, accidental, angular & interdisciplinary literatures. 

The Old Church is a not-for-profit arts venue in the heart of Stoke Newington, London.