Life & Faith

Pilgrim Hill is an off-grid, family-run hostel in the beautiful Huon Valley, Tasmania.   ---  “We have these people coming into our community every single year, and they’re a huge part of our economy and they’re a huge part of our community, but they're not really seen by the Australian public.”  Christina Baehr was a professional harpist, and Peirce Baehr planned to be an academic....

Sheridan Voysey is very familiar with the pain of broken dreams – and the beauty of what can come next.   ---  “Life is not made of straight lines. Nothing in nature has straight lines – that’s a human-created invention, the perfectly straight line. All else in creation has a curve, it has a kink, it has a twist … and here I am expecting life to go from Point A to Point B in a nice...

What qualifies as a Christmas movie? And what version of Christmas do they offer?  ---  It’s the final episode of Life & Faith for 2022! And time for Simon Smart, Justine Toh, and Natasha Moore to talk Christmas movies past and present: the films that stand the test of time and those that don’t; the borderline cases that feature Christmas but may or may not count as Christmas mo...

The story of what happened when one family decided to live simply so that others could simply live.  --- The rising cost of living is forcing hard questions upon plenty of Australians: can we afford our lives? More to the point: is our way of life sustainable – for us and the planet?   Jonathan and Kim Cornford and their two daughters are an Australian family leading a fairly ordina...

You don’t need to be a creative or an entrepreneur to share the human calling to make culture.    --- Here at CPX, we’ve been raving about Andy Crouch’s work on technology lately. But in this Life & Faith conversation, we revisit Andy’s earlier work – especially his influential first book Culture Making: Recovering our Creative Calling.    Andy tells us why he believes...

It’s often said that religion is a cause of war – but can it also be a cause of peace?  --- “Part of what makes religion such a powerful motivator in support for peace, is also what makes it a powerful motivator in support for violence.”  An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.   This principle of retaliation, that a person who has injured another should be penalized in a simil...

An author and an abbess reflect on the solace of nature and the art of stillness in a noisy world.  --- “We need the tonic of wildness,” wrote American author and naturalist Henry David Thoreau in Walden, or A Life in the Woods.    What is that tonic – and why is the natural world something of a cure?   Dr Eleanor Limprecht discovered ocean swimming during lockdown. She’s also...

Journalist Greg Sheridan on why he can’t stop talking about his Christian faith  --- Greg Sheridan has been the Foreign Editor at the Australian newspaper for 30 years. He’s known for his vast knowledge of domestic and foreign affairs – analysing and writing about Australia’s relationship with Asia, and including the rise of China, the U.S.’s influence in the world, the changing geopolitical...

Can we possibly still trust each other across some of the bitterest divides of our time?   ---  “We’re not going to live in a theocracy, we’re not going to replace the governor-general or a president with an ayatollah, a chief rabbi, a pope, or a Dalai Lama. The state must consider itself both neutral in religion and incompetent to adjudicate on religious affairs.”  The Austral...

Doing the right thing can have consequences or rewards that last a lifetime.  --- In this episode we consider the price we are willing (or not willing) to pay for holding on to our principles.    We speak with Max Jeganathan about our society’s apparent willingness to absorb higher costs of living in order to support Ukraine in its struggle against Russia. This dynamic is evidence t...

John Stackhouse explores evangelicalism’s contribution to the world.   --- In this conversation John Stackhouse explains who the evangelicals are in history and who they are today. What are they like? What do they believe? What makes them so busy and active in the world?  While lamenting some of the more regrettable failures of the tradition he belongs to, Stackhouse gives a convinc...

Andy Crouch has some questions about your relationship with your devices  --- Are you ever troubled by the way technology impacts our lives? Andy Crouch loves technology, but he is concerned that we use it wisely. What are the ways modern technology might diminish our humanity and how might it help us to flourish? In this episode of Life & Faith Andy talks about the difference between dev...

Theologian John Swinton was Chaplain to the Queen in Scotland. He spoke to Life & Faith on the day she died.   --- John Swinton has been many things in his life: Mental Health Nurse, Presbyterian minister, academic and author. He was also Chaplain to the Queen in Scotland, a role his mother was especially proud of! On the morning he was due to come into the CPX studio news came throu...

What does it look like not only to survive, but to thrive after trauma?   ---  “Banksias, if you can imagine, they’ve got this woody core, with those eyes dotted around the core. So those eyes contain the seeds of the banksia tree, and these seeds – these pods – open up after the ashy heat intensity of a bushfire. So we really loved this metaphor because it represents our hopes for...

A smorgasbord of delights for both the history nerd and the history sceptic.  ---  “I think people just arbitrarily impoverish their experience by the prejudice against the past.”  Does history get you excited – or make your eyes glaze over? This episode of Life & Faith draws together morsels of insight, warning, and surprise from some superstar historians and thinkers who want...

In honour of a special occasion, CPX distils 111 years’ worth of marriage experience into one episode.  ---   Mawwiage is what bwings us togevver for this episode of Life & Faith! With nuptials rapidly approaching for one member of the team, Simon, Justine, and Natasha talk to the experts – and among themselves – about what it means to not just get married but stay that way. &nb...

Astrophysicist Jennifer Wiseman on star-gazing, human significance, and the prospect of extra-terrestrial life. --- For Science Week we are rebroadcasting this chat with Jennifer Wiseman who joins us to speak about her journey to becoming an astrophysicist and how she resolved the ‘science and religion’ question. Born and raised in rural Arkansas, Wiseman grew up gazing at the night sky and had a...

Esther Meek’s childhood questions led her on a decades-long philosophical journey to towards truth and "the really real”.   --- As a 13 year-old Esther Meek was plagued by her questions about what is real and what is truth. A quest to find answers led here towards the study of philosophy where she has spent decades developing her thinking around how we know what we know. Can we ever have...

Two years on an Antarctic research station taught Alex Gaffikin about iso long before lockdown.  --- When Alex Gaffikin was 22, she took a nine week voyage from South London, where she grew up, to the Halley Research Station on Brunt Ice Shelf in Antarctica. She ‘wintered’ there for two years as a meteorologist.   In this interview, she gives us an insight into daily life on the sou...

Darrell Bock talks about the things that pushed him, as a young man, to ask deep questions about life and meaning. And where he found answers.    --- Darrell Bock is a world-renowned Biblical scholar with a keen eye on the cultural water we swim in. He’s also an incurable sports fan.   In this interview he talks to Simon Smart about the impact of losing his parents at a yo...

We’re languishing (still!) after two years of the pandemic. Can a burnout psychologist help?  --- Feeling a bit blah mid-way through 2022… still?  In 2021, organisational psychologist Adam Grant named that pandemic feeling. He called it “languishing” and described it as “the absence of well-being”.  “You’re not functioning at full capacity. Languishing dulls your motivation, disrupt...

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...

Simon, Justine, and Natasha debrief on their fave reads/watches of 2022 thus far. --- The CPX team - no surprises here - love a good book or film, and also love a good gossip about them afterwards.  Join Simon Smart, Justine Toh, and Natasha Moore as they gush about what they’ve seen and heard of late.  Natasha repents of her snobbery about audiobooks, having been converted to the form b...

It’s been 50 years since the Watergate scandal. Our trust in institutions has never quite recovered. --- On June 17, 1972, police arrested a group of burglars at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. Evidence linked the attempted burglary to US President Nixon’s campaign for re-election – leading to a Senate investigation that ultimately led to...

What our favourite companion animals can teach us about ourselves – and about God.  --- Are you a dog person or cat lover? You’re one or the other, apparently.  Wth 69% of Australian households now owning a pet, according to a 2021 survey by Animal Medicines Australia, this week Life & Faith is pleased to get controversial: we reveal that Australia’s “two-pet” system has a clear winn...