Life & Faith

Australian actor Anna McGahan tells with searing honesty her story of fame, and of unexpected faith.  --- “It was, I suppose, a divorce that looked like an estrangement, and even a hatred. Just this sense of ‘I’m not at home in my body, I don’t like the way my body looks, and I don’t like the way my body feels, and I don’t like the fact that I’m stuck within it’.” Anna McGahan never really expecte...

International cricketer (and singer!) Henry Olonga tells the story of his stand against a dictator.  --- “More sinister was the idea that we were apologists for the Mugabe regime - that line was being blurred and so I felt, well, I’ve got to make it very clear where I stand on this … It was early February I think when we did the protest, the first match against Namibia in the World Cup of 2003. Th...

A detective and a scholar tackle the question: why are we all so obsessed with crime stories? --- “When I was a child, not everything was a detective story. Now it is, on television. And it’s almost as if we all want to know, we want to know the big question: who did it??”  Judging by the perennial popularity of detective novels and crime shows, and the current wave of true crime podcasts, it’s no...

Porn has become a way of life for everyone—even for those who don’t view it. --- “I came to the realisation that what I was asking was not a sociological question, ‘what is pornography?’ It actually was a question of metaphysics, where reality lies.” What explains pornography’s pull? Is it just the sex? Or the way it ritualises the endless desire for more? In this episode of Life & Faith, Catholic...

How a not-neat Bible maps onto our not-neat lives.  --- "A text without a context is a pretext for whatever you want it to mean. When you do the chicken nugget thing and excerpt a verse, or a half a verse, or two verses, or three verses from its original context and don’t bother to try to find out what it meant in its original context - guess what, you are bound to twist that text.”  What happens...

A series of voices on the many voices that make up the world’s best-selling book.  --- “It’s the most read, most owned, best-selling book of all time.”  The Bible has over the centuries seeped into our language, our stories, even what we value and imagine. It’s true to say that it’s the most read book of all time - but we could equally call it one of the most unread, and sometimes one of the most...

New York Rabbi Bob Kaplan on how to share a society with people you radically disagree with. ---  “Being a rabbi, I always kid around that I am a Hebrew school dropout. The rabbi and I only agreed upon one thing in Hebrew school: he didn't want me there and I didn't want to be there.” Bob Kaplan never expected to become a rabbi. In this episode of Life & Faith, he tells Simon and Natasha about gro...

Valerie Browning on the choices that led to her life among the Afar nomads of the Ethiopian desert. --- “Why do you protect yourself? Life without risk is not life, it is simply not life.” Valerie Browning is a nurse and midwife who has spent the last 30 years among the Afar people of Ethiopia. She has endured civil war and snakebite, extreme heat and malaria, and nearly died in childbirth. She da...

Tim Costello on what resources we have in the face of overwhelming human need.  --- “So much of our experience is that there’s such goodness in people, and generosity. But when you see evil and look it in the eye, it’s overwhelming.”  From arguing with Vladimir Putin about political dissidents and the relationship of church and state, to witnessing the devastation of the 2004 tsunami or the power...

Tim Costello, Australia’s favourite social justice advocate, looks back on a storied, surprising life. --- “I don’t think you ever understand your faith until you’re out of your own culture and have to see it through other cultural lenses … The Italian Baptists all voted communist. They believed the Christian Democrats, with the Mafia, with even the Catholic church, would never clean up corruption...

The untold story of what drove Vincent Lingiari to lead the Wave Hill walk-off. --- “Those stories are as true and as real as someone having the audacity to say ‘I have a dream’ that racism will be changed in the United States of America. They’re the sorts of dreams that would motivate a leader to hold an eight-year campaign as opposed to an eight-week campaign.” It’s been 53 years since Vincent L...

Mark Greene on the frustrations, and the potential, of work in contemporary Western culture.  --- “It’s not at all clear to me that the way the work is currently being structured in Western culture is good for the majority of the people in it.”  Mark Greene grew up Jewish, and worked for a long time in advertising in London and New York. These days, he’s Executive Director of the London Institute...

Why might someone who’s not religious want to send their kids to a faith-based school?  --- “Teachers are one of the few groups of people in society who can tell other people what to do in their discretionary time and - by and large - they obey.”  Education is among our core activities as a society - so it’s unsurprising that it can be a battleground for all sorts of ideas.  David I. Smith is Prof...

Two conversations, two stories of lives committed to justice and the flourishing of others.  --- “The rescue of one person matters infinitely - it matters to that person, and it matters to us - and at the same time, that one rescue can send a ripple effect through a system of millions of people who are enslaved and exploited.” In this episode of Life & Faith, we bring together two conversations wi...

Philosopher Steven Garber on how we see our world, and ourselves. --- “Though we mostly don’t talk this way or see things this way, I think we are all profound religious people in that deepest sense - we are homo adorans , to use the Latin here. We will care most about something, we will commit ourselves most deeply to something. Homo adorans : we will adore something, we’ll make something most im...

  Film and TV critic Alissa Wilkinson on the end of the world - as pop culture imagines it. --- “Dystopia is like the more woke version of utopia. It’s where we’re working out our biggest anxieties as a culture. For instance, does the human race deserve to continue? Or would it be better if we just went away?” Alissa Wilkinson fell into film and television criticism after completing a degree in co...

  50 years on from the moon landing seems like a good time to ask a few existential questions. --- “He said he could stand on the moon, look up to earth, and with this gloved hand hold up his thumb and cover the entire planet. Under his thumb - every mountain, every river, every city, every person he knew, all the people he didn’t ... It made him feel terrifyingly small and vulnerable.”  It’s 50 y...

There’s sadness and hope on the long road towards Aboriginal recognition and reconciliation. --- “He said to me, ‘never forget you’re an Aboriginal, but do the best you can in a white man’s world’. So that’s what I’ve tried to do. With the help of the Lord Jesus.” Every year, National Reconciliation Week celebrates the relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians. The theme for 2...

Michael Ramsden on how we respond to injustice: as nations, groups, and individuals. --- “There’s a very interesting phrase in the Old Testament where it says you’ve turned justice into bitterness . In a more poetical translation it says you’ve turned justice into bitterness, so your righteous acts taste like poisoned fruit . In other words, if your motivation for justice is bitterness, even if yo...

Michael Ramsden talks to everyone from politicians to terrorists about culture, faith, and Jesus. “I just thought if I became a Christian my life would become worse … I was 100% sure that I was sacrificing on the altar of truth my only chance for happiness in this world.” Michael Ramsden was a very unlikely convert to Christianity - and that’s the least unlikely of the stories he has to tell in th...

Life & Faith tackles a series of moral dilemmas around poverty and luxury, beauty and utility.  --- How can we act ethically in a world that contains so much suffering?  One of our Facebook followers articulated the moral dilemma involved in devoting money to “non-essential” things when they commented on a Life & Faith episode about the Museum of the Bible, a $400-million project being built in Wa...

John Haldane on virtue, happiness, narcissism, and the possibility of God. --- “Philosophy from its origins has always had its focus on the idea that we investigate thought and the world and so on in order to answer the question: how ought I to live?” John Haldane is that rare breed, a public intellectual. He’s an academic philosopher who also works hard to introduce philosophical concepts to the...

Life & Faith hears from two young women who’ve made some very counter-cultural choices. --- “Sometimes we’ve been mistaken for many other things. We have a convent in New York City, and one night our Sisters were walking on the streets, back to one of our convents. A group approached them and said, ‘Hey Sisters, what’s the show on Broadway tonight?’ I mean, you see a lot of things in New York, and...

A conversation with film critic CJ Johnson, for anyone who’s ever loved a film. --- CJ Johnson was an only child who grew up watching Bill Collins present the best of Hollywood every Friday and Saturday night on Channel 10, and who calls film his “first real friend”. These days, he’s a film critic , lecturer, and playwright who watches and thinks about movies for a living and reviews them for the...

What could make someone give up everything to serve some of the world’s poorest women? --- "As a junior doctor I went to Ethiopia to work with my aunt in the desert area, and we were just wandering around the desert with camels, treating people under trees and shrubs and things in 50-degree heat … You’d have to sleep with a guard with a gun because the hyenas get quite close, so every now and then...