On the Way Podcast

How does faith show up in the everyday? How might we bring intention and focus to living out our faith in the everyday micro-moments of our lives and relationships? It is easy to remain in relational habits that are encultured or habituated by social patterns that are so often 'win-lose' and resistant to change. Restorative Practices are broadly a set of processes that enable people to work togeth...

Where is the Church calling Australian society to accountability in the face of experiences of escalating racism and hatred against First Nations people? This is a question Professor Anne Pattel-Gray asks as she recalls the times of church support for land rights and justice for the Stolen Generations, leaning into a Gospel message that proclaims equality and the dignity of all. Anne joins the pod...

Often we hear colonialism spoken of as something that happened in the past. At other times in public discourse the term attracts heated resistance and the voices of the colonised are frequently not heard. If colonialism is not just the past but remains in the air we breathe, we can miss the ongoing effects in areas of diverse as class, economy, gender relationships and race. Dr Kwok Pui-lan joins...

There are plenty of reasons right now that we may feel inclined to despair. The news brings to us all the violence of the world and a sense that the all we have known is fundamentally changing. Dom, Sue and Peter gather for this 'check in' conversation on how we are adjusting to the shifting of the powers in the world and the unmasking of systems that have been for some time working against life a...

What soil did you come from? There is no self-made person and perhaps this is a lesson that emerges with greater clarity in the garden than in many of the other spaces and ways we live and work.  Our sacred texts are rooted in agrarian cultures and the Gospels are full of Jesus' stories of green and growing things, yet we often hear a Christianity preached that seems more comfortable with the...

What if reconciliation is resistance? John Na'em Snobar, a Palestinian Christian and former Australian Diplomat, joins the podcast to speak from his lived experience both in diplomatic circles and on the ground in Israel/ Palestine of how speaking the truth is, in itself, a nonviolent response.  John speaks of the whole truth as that which names antisemitism as a centuries-old vile and violen...

To be human is to find oneself bound to multiple things that are conflictual yet at the same time compelling. The interplay of desire and morality creates one such 'double bind'. It is possible to follow desire and disregard the claims of morality in such a way that you can ruin your life. Equally it is possible to devote oneself to morality and disregard the voice of desire and ruin your life. De...

While society has advanced in its understanding of mental health, with advances in treatment, wider awareness and a reduction in stigma, there seems to be no abating of the mental health crisis. Tracing the history of modern psychotherapy, and the systematic approach taken by the medical sciences, Jim Schirmer returns to the podcast to reflect on the academic heritage of psychotherapy and the ther...

Anyone who describes an experience with the sacred will find themselves often struggling for words because they find the sacred is not a 'thing', nor a set of beliefs, but rather an encounter in open and vulnerable relationship which requires a far more humble and receptive form of knowing. Dr Iain McGilchrist, neuroscientist, philosopher and author, joins the podcast for a second conversation, th...

So often we think of leaders as born rather than made, or at least as having some kind of specialist predisposition such as charisma or perhaps an extraverted, more dominant personality. Dr Donna Ladkin joins Dom, Peter and Sue to explore the idea that maybe leadership is much more complex and may be better understood as a lived experience rather than a checklist of traits or behaviours. Whil...

What if dignity is a way of seeing that changes the kind of attention we pay to each other and to our world? Authenticity, human dignity and the courage to confront difficult truths are a common thread in the writing of Dr Beth-Sarah Wright who joins the podcast for this conversation during her recent visit to Brisbane.  The Latin root of the word 'respect' is to look again. Everyone is worth...

A special cross-over podcast episode between Spiritual Misfits and On the Way, recorded at 'Words For Those Who Wander' at West End Uniting Church in Brisbane.  In this conversation, Will Small, Dom Fay, Sue Grimmett, and Peter Catt explore what happens when the old spiritual maps stop working and we need to become cartographers for our time. Together they wrestle with profound questions: Wha...

We do everything we do in this world through our embodiment. There remains a pervasive myth that we move through this world working and creating without leaving any trace of our own lived experience upon our moving and interacting, commenting and creating. With such a mythology the dominant voices become normative, and can be associated with objective truth, obscuring the understanding and experie...

After 50 years of working with leaders globally, Margaret Wheatley, argues that leadership has never been more difficult. In the face of a multicrisis of climate and human created catastrophes, Meg points to the compelling need to awaken the human spirit and create “islands of sanity”: spaces of possibility and refuge created by people's commitment to forming healthy communities to do...

Exploring a curious story that she thought might be “knotty and weird”, of two comedians from her student days who converted to Christianity and decided to become Anglican priests, journalist Lamorna Ash unearths a recurring phenomenon of a new generation discovering religion for themselves. Lamorna sets out on a journey that takes her across Britain to talk with Gen Z-ers wrestling wi...

"Sooner or later, everything falls away." With these words, author Parker J. Palmer begins his much-loved poem exploring the landscape of loss, grief and letting go. In this conversation, Parker reads the poem and reflects on the transient nature of reality and the great tapestry that holds all things together.  Dom joins Parker in his living room in Madison, Wisconsin.  See omnystudio.c...

Alongside being the title of Pádraig Ó Tuama's recently released collection of poetry,  Kitchen Hymns is also an informal term referring to the hymns sung in Irish homes that weren't allowed in formal church contexts, due to their being in the Irish language rather than Latin.  It is this rebellious and honest flavour of sacred expression that has been at the heart of P&aac...

In the midst of our busy lives, we can so easily miss the sacred shining through every moment. Children are instinctively drawn to bewilderment and astonishment at the wonder of life, and yet it is a way of seeing that often fades as the rigours and responsibilities of adult life take over.  Barbara Brown Taylor has been exploring the idea of reverence in her work for decades through her belo...

What do we do with the weight of the past? We so often find ourselves clinging and grasping to that which has ended, getting stuck in self-loathing and judgement over that which we regret, or becoming too cautious and comfortable to step boldly beyond that which we have outgrown, leaving us struggling to live fully in the present moment and all that is emerging.  In this episode, Rob Bell exp...

While we may struggle to agree on the answers to life's biggest questions, we are all united in asking them. It is this shared questioning that binds us as humans, with each of us carrying a deep ache for something greater, something sacred and something real.  Drawing on the wisdom of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has explored this s...

What if the way our brains have evolved is inhibiting us from seeing reality as it actually is? This is the groundbreaking theory of renowned neuroscientist, psychiatrist and philosopher Dr Iain McGilchrist, whose research on the two hemispheres of the brain and the different ways in which they operate sheds a great deal of light on so many of the problems we find ourselves facing today.&nbsp...

Karl Rahner once remarked that 'the Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not exist', and it is in this spirit that friend of the podcast Alexander John Shaia joins Dom for a conversation about recovering the mystical way of seeing today.  Recorded in Granada, Spain, this episode explores how we can come to see the stories of our tradition less as historical moments, and more as ti...

Our culture constantly bombards us with products, ideas and approaches that promise to heal us, cure us, make us whole, and take away the pain of life entirely. We are led to believe that we are only one change away from the life we've always felt like we should be living, and that we need only to find the right book, program, or product to help us get there.  But what if the truth is that no...

What are the biggest questions that would stay with you across your life? is there a God? Why is there something, not nothing, and what can it possibly all mean? How can we live a good life? Richard Holloway joins the podcast once again from Edinburgh to share some of his reflections on these questions which have shaped his life. In this latest book, On Reflection, Richard recruits poets, art...

What cost do we pay when we remain living in self-regarding reactivity? What do we do when we find ourselves stuck, trapped by the illusory pictures we have of ourselves and unable to be a channel of life for others? Former Archbishop of Canterbury and author of many books, Dr Rowan Williams, joins Dom, Sue and Peter to explore how Eastern Christian spiritual writings can be a resource to help us...