Life & Faith

Checkpoints, borders, normalcy, and hope: a sketch of daily life in the West Bank.  --- Areej Masoud lives in Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus. In terms of physical distance, it’s very close to Jerusalem. In terms of social reality, it’s a world away.  “If I want to go to Jerusalem, I need to get a permit. It’s not like I want to go, and I just start my car and leave. I would have to go through...

Os Guinness talks freedom, human rights, and why the 1960s counterculture was the best moment to come of age. --- “In Europe, you could go to any crossroads - we lived in Switzerland then - and there’d be six hitchhikers. One would be reading Nietzsche, one would be reading Siddhartha , one would be reading Robert Heinlein, and one would reading C. S. Lewis, and they’d say ‘hey man, you should rea...

Denis Alexander on whether there’s purpose in biology - and in life. --- “You stand back and look at the narrative as a whole, that to me doesn’t look necessarily without purpose … it’s like a drama - it looks like it’s going somewhere." Denis Alexander is a molecular biologist, cancer researcher, and one-time Director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion at Cambridge. He’s been writi...

A conversation with British journalist Christina Patterson, in this cross-over with The Sacred Podcast. --- “I remember at university meeting someone who said to me, ‘Well, the point in life is to get on, isn’t it’. And I was thunderstruck - naively thunderstruck - because it had literally never occurred to me that that was what you were here for. I was absolutely brought up to believe that you we...

The CPX team talk through fresh angles on the old story as they write for the media this Easter. --- What place - beyond public holidays and Cadbury Creme Eggs - does Easter occupy in our cultural imagination? Doing “public Christianity” means joining up the dots between the Christian story and what life is actually like in the 21st century, and festivals like Christmas and Easter are key moments...

Hagar International puts names and faces to the hidden scourge of modern slavery. --- “You are the God who sees me.” Hagar International is named for one of the first slave women we know about in history. Hagar was a slave to Abraham and Sarah - her story is told in the Torah, the Bible, and the Koran. Founded in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in 1994, the organisation named after her is dedicated to rescu...

A philosopher and a butcher dig into what we should and shouldn’t eat, and why. --- “As society has shifted away from being in close proximity to farms and food production, people are increasingly concerned about where their food’s coming from - the condition under which animals are raised and reared, and certain farming practices, [such as] pesticide use and the effects that that may have on the...

Alison Milbank on why Tolkien and Middle-Earth exercise such a hold over us. --- “It does suggest that within the real world there are portals - thin places, if you like, where we can pass to other worlds and return. And I think that’s what the best fantasy [literature] does. It gives you an understanding of this world as much richer, much deeper than we normally realise.” When J. R. R. Tolkien’s...

Why are we so polarised? Tim Dixon offers not just a diagnosis, but actual solutions. --- “It’s much easier to hold very hostile prejudicial views of other people if you actually don’t know them personally.” Tim Dixon is co-founder of More in Common, an international initiative which has published some of the world's leading research on the drivers of polarisation and social division. He worked as...

Philosopher and theologian John Milbank on left vs right, Harry Potter, and how none of us behave like we’re just atoms. --- If you’re wanting a crash course on “isms” like liberalism, secularism, and populism from anyone, it’s John Milbank. In this wide-ranging conversation with Simon Smart, the philosopher and theologian has a way of never saying quite what you expect him to. He questions the id...

A Nigerian YouTuber who's made a name for herself asking hard questions of powerful people. --- “I’m trying to wake people up. Not just in Nigeria - I talk about [other] African countries as well so that they can know we have a lot in common, and so that we can all together demand better governance and make our leaders accountable.” Adeola Fayehun is a Nigerian journalist who’s built a global foll...

Simon, Natasha, and John share the stories behind their favourite Christmas carols. --- It’s not quite a Bridget Jones-style situation – sobbing into shiraz and lip-syncing to “All by myself” on Christmas eve – but this year, Justine Toh is all alone in the recording booth for Life and Faith. Regular hosts Simon Smart and Natasha Moore have scarpered off before Christmas, with Simon on long servic...

An exploration of the role of emotional, social, and especially spiritual care in modern medicine. --- “Physical and psychological disruption have obvious spiritual consequences, and spiritual disruption has physical consequences. One of the things we know is that when people feel hopeless, their physical well-being suffers. So if hope is connected to spirituality, then spirituality is connected t...

It took a famous atheist philosopher to shake the foundations of Sarah Irving-Stonebraker’s atheism. --- “A few months into my time at Oxford, my friends and I heard that a very famous atheist philosopher known as Peter Singer was coming to give a series of lectures. The lectures were on the topic of ethics – do we have any duties to other people? Do human lives have any value? So I went to these...

Courage, blindness, unexpected romance, and a meeting of cultures: the story of missionary Amy Oxley Wilkinson. --- “In about 1944, when Amy was in the East End of London with her grandson, they went into a Chinese restaurant, and the whole restaurant stood up, and she spoke to them in Chinese. She was English – well, she was Australian! – but this part of China was in her heart.” This scene would...

Professor Sarah Williams on the importance of language and history when it comes to gender. — “We have lost the language for talking about any form of biological determinism. Gender has replaced the word sex, which is ironic given the fact that it was introduced to create the possibility of nuance.” Questions about gender are a big part of the zeitgeist – they’re incredibly important for us at thi...

We look back on the span of World War I through the prism of one man’s life – and death. --- The centenary of the end of World War I is not an easy one to know what to do with. The relief on the faces of those captured in photos from 11 November 1918, celebrating in the streets, is palpable. But the futility of the long war, and our knowledge, looking back, of what was still to come, make the anni...

Tremper Longman says the Old Testament remains fresh and exciting to him – even after 40 years studying it. --- Bloody battles, glorious poetry, Hollywood-level drama, even romance … the Old Testament has it all. But how many people have read it? A lot of us think we know what it’s all about – without having chalked up much, if any, personal experience within its pages. Even Christians often skip...

Sociologist Tom Aechtner on why complexity is better than conflict, and how we change our minds. --- “Even from the very beginning, Christian resistance to evolutionary theory, or also Islamic resistance to evolutionary theory, wasn’t necessarily bound to people reading Genesis and saying, ‘this is in opposition to evolutionary theory’. A lot of the early opposition came about because evolution se...

The Corbetts arrived in Everton ready to fight losing battles – but they’re winning some too. — “Listen to me. You’re grown-ups. This is bad. You are being bad unless you do something about it.” The words of a seven-year-old kid living in Everton, Liverpool. He had just drawn a picture of an empty plate, with the outline of Africa and Liverpool over the top of it.  “Because I’ve heard kids in Afri...

YA novelist Claire Zorn on surviving high school, why she didn’t expect to be a writer, and mental illness. --- “I suppose I always had these preconceived ideas of the sort of person a writer was, and I didn’t have a whole lot of confidence in my ability to write … I think I thought that a writer was a very serious, intellectual, well-read sort of person. I do read a lot, but I thought it was some...

What is a life well lived? We consider the ripple effects of one man’s influence on generations of students. --- A British Prime Minister is once reported to have said, “I wish I had as much power as a school headmaster!” Every one of us has some influence on those around us, for better and for worse. For some people, the ripple effects of that influence go on and on, far beyond our expectations....

When you’re a minority of a minority of a minority, the vital question to ask is where you belong. --- “To be a Tamil Christian in itself is a minority but then you take that and transplant that as a refugee community in Australia, and the Tamil Christian community in Australia is even smaller again.” It’s no exaggeration to say that Max Jeganathan is a minority of a minority of a minority. His re...

A journalist defies our squeamishness about religion to make the case that God is good for you. --- “I may get into trouble here with fellow Christians – obviously the New Testament is the centre of Christianity – but there is a sense in which the Old Testament is more fun . Parts of the Old Testament are great poetry and parts of it are written in a very elevated style, but a lot of it is written...

It’s everywhere, and it can be crippling. But people can be freed from the grip of trauma. --- “Trauma is an overwhelming need which people really don’t see. It’s not a physical wound that people would identify and want to help you with, it’s a wound that you have on the inside because of something you have gone through.” Elizabeth Muriuki is General-Secretary of the Bible Society in Kenya, and sh...