Life & Faith

The ex-Rolling Stones journalist throws open the door the devil hides behind. Warning: not for kids. The devil’s best trick, according to French poet Charles Baudelaire and/or criminal mastermind Keyser Soze in The Usual Suspects (1995) was convincing the world that he didn’t exist.   Randall Sullivan’s new book, The Devil’s Best Trick: How the Face of Evil Disappeared , argues that desp...

With despair on the rise and hope in short supply, children’s literature offers people of all ages a treasure trove of wisdom. Dr Amanda B Vernon is a literature expert who believes that children's stories are not just for children. In this interview with Life & Faith, Amanda talks about how stories written with children in mind often shed light on deep human needs, including our longing for j...

Darrell Bock fears the church in the U.S. is in danger of losing its distinctiveness. How might it recover?  The United States is a divided country, and this year’s presidential election will bring that into sharp focus. Darrell Bock is a New Testament Scholar at Dallas Theological Seminary and the Executive Director of Cultural Engagement at the Hendricks Center. Life & Faith interviews...

The spirit of our politics feels negative and harmful. Michael Wear believes the improved spiritual health and civic character of individuals can change that. “We belong to a political party because we believe things, we should not believe things because we belong to a political party”. Michael Wear is the author of The Spirit of Our Politics: Spiritual Formation and the Renovation of Public Life....

The headlines are grim, and the world feels apocalyptic. It’s time to become the people the world needs right now. “I don't know how to fix climate change or geopolitics, but I know what I'm called to do, which is put my roots down deep into love and be growing up, be becoming the kind of person that the world needs.” Elizabeth Oldfield is the author of the book Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in...

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 envi...

T he astonishing technological progress humans have made sometimes raises the warning that we shouldn’t be “playing God”. Nick Spencer from Theos think tank disagrees.  In their book Playing God: science, religion, and the future of humanity , Nick Spencer and Hannah Waite insist that contrary to the warnings to avoid “playing God”, human beings are in fact a God-playing species and have a re...

Bill Bennett, director of the film The Way, My Way and Camino legend Johnnie Walker Santiago reflect on the spiritual riches of going on pilgrimage.   “I see this walk as an 800km long cathedral”. So says Australian filmmaker Bill Bennett in the film The Way, My Way , which depicts Bill’s experiences walking the Camino de Santiago. The Camino de Santiago, or the Way of St James, is a net...

This dreaded disease seems to strip away everything that makes us, well, us. A chaplain and a psychiatrist remind us of the human at the centre of the diagnosis. --- The ‘d’ word – dementia – is one that everyone fears. It seems to strip away everything that made that person with the disease the person we once knew. It’s easy to lose sight of the person, the human at the centre of the diagnosis. T...

Mercy Aiken tells Life & Faith of the joy-filled, yet painful life of Palestinian Christian, Bishara Awad. Bishara was a child in Jerusalem when his father was shot and killed during the Israeli-Arab war of 1948. The story of his life and that of his family provides a sobering portrait of life in Israel/Palestine during decades of war, violence, tension and dashed dreams for those seeking a pe...

Asuntha Charles has lived in some toughest places in the world. And she’s loved it.     Long    As a young woman, Asuntha Charles stubbornly defied her culture to advocate for vulnerable women and girls. That determination never left her as she dedicated her life to voiceless people in not only her native India, but places like Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Sudan and Iraq. Here...

War correspondent Janine di Giovanni has covered the near-extinction of the ancient Christian communities of the Middle East.   ---  “They’ve survived plagues, they’ve survived pillages, they’ve survived raids, they’ve survived purges – and they most recently survived ISIS.”   The Christian communities of the Middle East – in places like Iraq and Syria, Egypt and Palestine – are anc...

CPX writers talk about how they’re hoping to breathe new life into a very old story.   ---  Get a glimpse into the CPX writers’ room as Simon, Natasha, Justine and Max talk about what they’re writing about Easter, or how they go about working out how to write about Easter.   Natasha talks about American novelist Marilynne Robinson’s new book Reading Genesis and how Robinson’s courte...

We explore the spiritual needs of people in intensive care in hospital, or behind bars.  ---  “I went to see this lady and as soon as I walked in, she actually said, ‘f*** off, I don’t want to have anything to do with you people’.”  Chaplaincy in Australia is contested. If people have had a bad experience with the church or concerned that someone might be trying to manipulate them,...

For decades now in the West, religion has been on the retreat. In places where, 50 years ago, going to church on a Sunday was just what you did, we’ve had generations now for whom that would be a very foreign concept.   Justin Brierley is an author and very popular podcaster. For 17 years he hosted a podcast called Unbelievable where he would bring together atheist and Christian thinkers...

Sarah Williams explains how the mother of modern feminism fell off the pages of history. --- After her death in 1906, Josephine Butler was described as one of the “few great people who have moulded the course of things”. (For the record, she was also described by peers as “the most beautiful woman in the world”.) Yet how many of us have heard of her? A bit too feminist for later Christians, a bit...

Reflections on a human experience that’s at once routine and exceptional; both very costly and very good.  ---  Life & Faith has covered many stories relating to birth over the years – incredible stories of courage and heartbreak, difficult decisions, life and death – but we’ve never done an episode on birth itself: what’s amazing about this process, what’s so hard about it, what mak...

…of which CPX’s Justine Toh is first and foremost.  --- In the lead up to Easter, Justine is giving up not only sugar, but her ignorance about all things Lent. She speaks to Catholic theologian Matt Tan, who goes by Awkward Asian Theologian on socials, about Lent and its three-fold focus: giving up, alms-giving, and prayer. They discuss the difficulty of self-sacrifice and the way that, stran...

20 years on from the founding of Facebook, what role do these platforms play in our lives?  ---  February 4 marked 20 years since Mark Zuckerburg launched the site that was initially known as The Facebook from his Harvard dorm room, so this seems like a good time to take stock of what social media now looks like, and what our lives look like as a result.  Whether you’re an avid user...

Anglican Priest David Pileggi talks about what Christmas means in his town of Jerusalem in the midst of war.    --- Anglican priest David Pileggi has lived in Jerusalem for over 40 years. In that time he has seen a lot, but recent events in Israel and Gaza have been as shocking and disturbing as any he has encountered. He talks to Life & Faith about his life in the “Holy City” -...

British journalist David Goodhart on the Anywhere-Somewhere divide challenging national unity abroad and at home. --- Is Australia polarised?   The country is no UK roiled by Brexit, or US torn apart by the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency in 2016. But we’ve had our own brushes with polarisation – most recently on the question of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament.&nbsp...

Our cultural narrative says there is no supernatural or transcendent realm. The CPX team wants to break that spell.  --- Seen & Heard is back – and this time, the team have disenchantment in their sights, or the belief that there is no more supernatural or transcendent realm to life, that science is the only verifiable path to truth, and that all things religious are debunked, once and fo...

A new book tells the stories of people whose encounters with New Atheism set them on the path to Christianity.   ---  “He said, I’ve been a scientist all my life and I was an atheist – quite a happy atheist, you know, I wasn’t particularly looking for other worldviews. Until I read The God Delusion in 2006. And that really shook my faith in atheism.”  It’s around 15 years ago t...

This week marks 60 years since the death of CS Lewis and that seems like an appropriate moment to return to a very popular episode from a couple of years back. --- A lot of people know the date 22nd of November 1963 because that's the date that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. That dramatic event overshadowed another death that same day on the other side of the Atlantic – the...

Seeing war up close and surviving nonetheless leaves its mark. --- Andrew Hastie would not be the first person to join the defence force out of both a hunger for adventure and deep-seated sense of duty. After a distinguished career in the army, including being an officer in the elite Special Air Service (SAS), Hastie speaks to Life & Faith about the experience. He explains why he joined up, hi...