Life & Faith

Caring for the drunk and the vulnerable in the party capital of Europe. --- “It was a square mile that had more pubs, clubs, and bars than anywhere in the European continent.” San Antonio, Ibiza. According to Brian Heasley, it’s the “playground of the rich and famous”, a “stomping ground of the young and drunk”, a beautiful place with an underbelly. “There’s a darker element – everybody’s taking d...

People are prepared to pay the price for ethical fashion – and the industry is taking notice. --- “We believe that we won’t need to use the word ethical in the next five years - because that is what the fashion industry will be.” Davyn de Bruyn has a bold vision – and he doesn’t think it’s too far out of reach. As the Managing Director of Thread Harvest, an ethical online fashion marketplace based...

A conversation about death, loss, and what you can really say and do to help grieving people. --- “Hope was with us for 199 days and then she was gone.” Nancy Guthrie has had to live through what many dread as the worst of all experiences of death – the death of her child. And she had to go through it twice. “I had lots of questions. There were things I thought I understood about God that this bro...

An aerospace engineer and an astrogeologist discuss the whether and why of space exploration. --- "For all these wonderful technologies, for all these incredible achievements that you see - rockets that can be reused, drones that can fly long missions, every discovery by the Hubble or the Kepler - there’s this realisation that when all the really, really good stuff comes along, I’m going to be dea...

Is the human race on an inevitable trajectory onward and upward? Not quite, says Nick Spencer. --- "We are the same species but with bigger sticks, and those sticks can be used to reach further and achieve more - but they can conversely be used to beat a lot more people. That is precisely the point. Were we to find ourselves under the same pressures of resource scarcity that our ancestors endured...

Politics, religion, and being a good guest at dinner - or a good citizen in the public square. --- "The old edict in the UK is that there are certain conversations you avoid around the dinner table: one is politics, the other is religion. Seeing as I write on politics and religion, I don’t get invited to dinner very much." Nick Spencer says it makes sense to think that the combination of religion...

The gripping, often irreverent, sometimes hilarious history of the Bible in Australian culture. --- "It’s always been gloves off when it comes to the Bible in Australia." The Bible is the most popular book in the world. But this blanket statement hides all kinds of realities - it’s loved and pored over by some, it gathers dust on many shelves, and it’s hotly debated in parliaments and universities...

How a near-death experience helped one man embrace all of life – the beautiful, and the ugly. --- "Real faith is to trust God in the good and the bad." After officiating a wedding, David Robertson wasn’t feeling too well and broke into a cold sweat. He ended up lying on the ground in front of his church, in a pool of his own blood. Turns out, the Scottish church minister had contracted a virus tha...

Astrophysicist Jennifer Wiseman on star-gazing, human significance, and the prospect of extra-terrestrial life. --- "If you fund some level of basic science, it lifts the human spirit, it tends to give people motivation to do other kinds of science as well, it feeds a lot of other worthwhile human enterprises." Jennifer Wiseman grew up in rural Arkansas, an experience which gave her an abiding lov...

Will the real Jesus please stand up? John Dickson’s new book is a quest for the historical Jesus. --- “The real Jesus in the sources is far more interesting. The Jesus there is striking, dangerous, intriguing, beautiful, bizarre, scary, and incredibly comforting. You just can’t pin him down. That’s the great thing about the historical Jesus – there’s no way of fitting him inside a box.” In this ep...

Two Aboriginal women give their first-hand accounts of growing up on Christian missions. --- "I do a lot of praying. I just got to hand it over to the Lord. He understands what I’m going through and how I’m feeling. He went through a lot of grief himself and it must still break his heart to see the way some of us live." Ngardarb Riches is a Bardi Jawi woman from the West Kimberley Coast of Austral...

Social researcher Hugh Mackay on building a more compassionate and less anxious society. --- "Some public health experts are now saying that loneliness is a greater risk to our public health than obesity." Hugh Mackay, one of Australia’s leading researchers, believes there’s something wrong with the state of our nation and the lives of its citizens. "You can look at specific factors in individual...

The greatest facepalm of the Crusades - and more stories of crusaders turning on other Christians. --- "Three days was the accepted period of a sack in the Middle Ages. They sacked it for a little bit more than that … it greatly damaged the city of Constantinople. And that ultimately was the end of the Crusade. It had never raised a sword against the Muslim, but it had actually conquered and destr...

The hungry, the sick, the imprisoned - or as the Knights of Malta called them, "Our Lords the Sick". --- "The Knights Hospitaller, as they were known, got permission to set up the first hospital in Jerusalem. They were connected with the Crusades and they were a sovereign military order. Why? Because they had to, in the course of their work, actually defend - sometimes with the sword - their work...

A confronting - and deeply personal - look at the roots of racial division in the US. --- "We still live under the long shadow of the plantation. Indeed, freedoms have been spread to a larger group of people over time, but that spread has been at the cost of ongoing oppression of black people in ways that have become very apparent thanks to video cams and cell phones that betray the brutality of t...

Jim lived through the Troubles. He takes us on a very personal tour of this fraught history. --- "When I used to get up out of bed in the mornings, my first thought was: how do we avoid being murdered, by the murder gangs? Also, how do we avoid the British army? And also, how do we attack the British Army? The change being today, when my kids get out of bed in the morning, they say, well ok, we ha...

John Lennox on where science came from, religious violence, and God talk in post-Soviet Russia. --- "You probably believe in gravity - are you aware that nobody knows what it is? You believe in consciousness; no one knows what it is. You believe in energy; no one knows what it is. You believe in time; no one knows what it is. And yet they believe in these things." John Lennox is a Professor of Mat...

Master storyteller Tim Winton on unlikely friendships, masculinity, and grace. --- “Hope deranges us. Hope breaks things and breaks things down. In order to change, things must be broken.” Tim Winton’s latest novel, The Shepherd’s Hut , opens with a quote from American poet Liam Rector’s “Song Years”: “Change is hard and hope is violent”. Continuing the Winton tradition of celebrating the lives of...

The story of one of the most elusive, controversial, and misinterpreted figures in ancient history. --- "The film does navigate a very intimate relationship that Mary has with Jesus, and an immense love she has for him both as a human being and as a divine person. Ultimately, what these two do together is far more profound than a marriage, or a relationship - it’s something far greater." Mary of M...

What is an artist doing working for NASA? Dan Goods on the beauty and vastness of the universe. --- "I had one grain of sand, and that represented our galaxy. What was cool was that I could have someone at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory drill a hole a tenth of the size of the grain of sand into it - and that little, tiny hole is where we live." The universe is a vast and beautiful thing. We know...

How Florence Nightingale, Hannah Marshman, and Harriet Beecher Stowe changed the world. --- March 8, 1917. As the world is in the throes of a brutal war, tens of thousands of people gather in the centre of the Russian capital, Petrograd. They’re on strike, for "bread and peace". This day marked the beginning of the Russian Revolution. Four days later, the Czar abdicated, and women were given the r...

An exploration of one of the most central questions of our culture: who am I? --- "All of our lives have unscripted moments, things that don’t go according to plan." You do you. It’s one of the more recent variations on an old motivational theme. Follow your heart. To thine own self be true. Write your own story. But how well do we really know ourselves? How much control do we have over the script...

An atheist, a Taliban leader, and a teenager fighting cancer respond to the Bible. --- "At the heart of one of the most violent regimes the world has known, there was someone who was wanting to read the Bible but had never had the opportunity." The Bible first made its mark on Amy Orr-Ewing’s life through her then-atheist father. He was told that the only reason he should become a Christian is bec...

Why the world needs refugee organisations - both secular and religious - to work together for good. --- "There’s also this implicit assumption [in Western societies] that religion is somehow the source of all conflict. What that forgets is that religion is often also a source of peace - it’s an inspiration for people to engage in peace-building activities." According to the UN, an unprecedented 65...

On any given Sunday in America, you may find more people in football stadiums than in churches. --- "If you had a kid right now, you would put them on the waiting list to be able to purchase season tickets for the Green Bay Packers by the time they were 49 years old." It has been said that football in America is more than a game – it’s a religion. For example, in the city of Green Bay, which has a...