Life & Faith

British writer Francis Spufford talks about heartbreak and loss, hope and eternity, in his latest novel, Light Perpetual. --------- In November 1944, a German V2 missile obliterated a Woolworths store in South London, killing 168 people. Fifteen of that number were children under 11 years old. For 13 years Francis Spufford has, on his way to work each day, walked past a plaque commemorating the ev...

Acclaimed author Susannah McFarlane on meeting her birth mother and then, to her great dismay, God.  — The EJ12 Girl Hero series, the EJ Spy School Series, D-Bot Squad, Boy vs Beast, Go Girl!, and Zac Power. For decades, Susannah McFarlane has been the author, publisher, and driving force behind some of Australia’s most popular children’s books. In her 50s, Susannah met her birth mother for the fi...

Do you have a soul? What is soul/a soul/the soul? We talk as though it’s a real thing: you can sell your soul, search your soul, keep body and soul together, not tell a soul, be the life and soul of the party, find something good for the soul or else soul-destroying. But do people still believe in the soul? And why? In this episode of Life & Faith, Simon Smart, Natasha Moore, and Justine Toh debri...

Dom Knight's 2020 Dictionary provides a light-hearted (and at points serious) look back at the most extraordinary of years.

As we come to the end of the year that seemed like it might never end, the CPX team gets together for one last episode. We talk about the year that was - including Megxit, impeachment, Netflix, and zombie minks - as well as the “one story” that Christians keep coming back to, and why we think it’s the right story for this year (and every year!) Simon Smart, Justine Toh, Natasha Moore, Mark Stephen...

What do neuroscience, philosophy, and theology have to say about the mystery of human consciousness?   “Even if we come up with a beautiful elegant neuroscience of consciousness - which I hope we do - that will still leave the question, why are we conscious at all? Why does consciousness exist in the first place?”   Despite everything we know about the universe we live in, the content of our own h...

Three stories of ordinary people, and the extraordinary care they take of people in their lives. For 11 years, Diana Aitken has been part of the soup kitchen at St Matthew’s Anglican Church in Manly, where a community of care has sprung up that goes far beyond the lavish meals served every Monday night. Issam Khoury cared for his wife Irene during her long struggle with polycystic liver and kidney...

From who gets an ICU bed to volunteering for a vaccine trial, ethics in the time of COVID is a complicated business. “Sometimes we fall into the trap of thinking that life is mostly ethically neutral unless we come across some catastrophe or other, or some really difficult moral choice. But when we look more closely - and this I think is what COVID has done - we realise that our values and our bel...

Krish Kandiah tells us about the joys and challenges of caring for children in great need. 'Well, we got this call late on a Friday afternoon. And you know that the local social services are in trouble, because they're phoning us, and we've already got six kids in the house. So they say, "Well, Krish, and Miriam, we know you've already got a full house, but is there any way you can take another on...

Jazz, haiku, marriage: do limits hem us in, or make us more free?  “I've heard people say, ‘Oh, jazz must be easy. You can just play anything you want.’ But actually, jazz is very difficult, because you can play anything you want.” Whoever you are, whatever your life is like, freedom is something you probably want a little (or a lot) more of. But what is it?  “There's this paradoxical irony in whi...

John Stackhouse’s new book Can I Believe? is for the curious, and the hesitant. ”And this sad little figure in a remote corner of the Roman Empire becomes the leader of the most popular religion in the history of the world - which means it's the most popular explanation for everything ever in human history. Now, that's just really strange. We're just used to it, but it's a pretty weird story.” 84...

Tim Costello brings a lifetime of experience to bear on the question: why is compassion so complicated? “You won’t find anyone who actually says humans shouldn’t be compassionate. It then gets messy because we soon discover that we have different objects of compassion, priorities for compassion. It’s fascinating to me that, whether you’re on the right or left or in between, you will validate your...

81% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in 2016. Will that be the case this November? In the second of our two episodes on the upcoming US election, we explore the statistic that 81% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election. According to a Pew Research report released in July, as many as 80% of white evangelicals indicated that they would still vote for him in 202...

A polarised country, a politicised faith - and how both are playing out in the US election. The bitter divides between Republicans and Democrats this US election season reflect a much bigger story.  In this first of two episodes on the election, we explore the white evangelical embrace of the Republican Party and why Black voters - including Black Protestants - tend to vote Democrat. We also cover...

On the 20th anniversary of the Sydney Olympic Games, we look back at what made those games so special. Simon Smart and Mark Stephens ask what these kinds of events can tell us about who we are as human beings. Former Olympics Minister Bruce Baird talks us through the hair-raising bid process and the joy of seeing the whole thing come together so well. Veteran sportswriter Greg Baum outlines what h...

Former Prime Minister Paul Keating’s 1992 “Redfern speech” laid out a challenge to extend opportunity and care, dignity and hope to the indigenous people of Australia. Nearly 30 years on that challenge remains. We have not yet succeeded in finding justice, wellbeing and a clear path for reconciliation and full inclusion of Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander people in the life of the nation. Kea...

Are people essentially good or flawed? We review Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History. In 1965, six Tongan teenage boys were marooned on a desert island for more than a year. But they didn’t descend into savagery, Lord of the Flies -style, once civilisation had been stripped away. Instead, they worked together, grew their own food, and sang and prayed together each day. In Humankind: A Ho...

Why does the Second World War continue to have such a strong appeal for us? “It’s the fudging of the truth that’s much more important than the actual lies … mythology is more difficult to get to grips with.” In summer blockbusters and bestseller lists, on internet chat forums and national debates, World War II is a cultural touchstone for us. Decades on from Basil Fawlty’s famous “don’t mention th...

A Christian sets out to meet the Jesus of Islam – and a Muslim encounters the Christian Jesus. “The thing about Jesus is, if he was an idea or if he was a philosophy or if he was a character in a book, then yeah, we could all have opinions about him. But if Jesus is a real person, particularly if he's a real live person today that's interacting with the world, then we really don’t get to pick and...

The working mums of lockdown have had to juggle everything. They’ve had enough. “The personal is political”, goes the feminist catchphrase. For one particular group of people—working mums—shutdown has made that very clear.  If women have been fortunate enough to keep their jobs in what’s been dubbed the “pink-collar recession”, they’ve also more likely been the ones juggling working from home whil...

What makes us such … apocaholics? What happened to all the utopias? It seems like the stories we tell ourselves about the future now – in blockbusters, bestselling novels, reality TV shows, and your daily news feed – are almost uniformly bleak, even dystopian. What is feeding our cultural pessimism? In this week’s episode, Simon Smart talks to Natasha Moore about her brand new book The Pleasures o...

Professor John Lennox weighs up the benefits and potential pitfalls of AI and the implications it has for what it means to be human. In this Episode of Life & Faith Simon Smart talks to Oxford Professor John Lennox about his new book, 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity. Lennox poses some vital questions of the AI enterprise, offering some warnings that the technology is vastl...

What happens when religious language reckons with racial injustice.   “The original sin of this country still stains our nation today,” said Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden in the wake of the police killing, in May, of George Floyd. The phrase “America’s original sin is slavery” is so widely used in the United States that it is practically cliché. But what does it actually mean? “When yo...

Oncologist and writer Ranjana Srivastava believes there is such a thing.   “Having watched countless people die, I do think that there are ways that you can make the end more peaceful for yourself and for those you love. I do think that there are better ways of dying.” How often do you think about your own death?  Ranjana Srivastava is a cancer specialist and the author, most recently, of A Better...

We’ve all been learning some things about ourselves in lockdown. “There’s this other layer from my experience where there was this emotional exhaustion of video calls. I’ve never wanted to miss catching up with people, I’ve always loved it. And so the experience of having catch-ups with people and feeling really emotionally exhausted at the end of that was new. Potentially it’s the experience of a...