Life & Faith

The CPX team bring you a highlights reel of the year that was. --- Fear, murder, Masterchef, Aboriginal Moses, the moon: Simon, Justine, and Natasha sit down to mull over some of the stuff they got to talk about this year.    In this end-of-year special, the team narrow down their favourite anecdote; share some stories behind the stories they brought you; and nominate their most uncomfortable and most memorable moments from the conversations that made Life & Faith in 2019.      ---   Episodes referenced in this conversation:   A Lot with a Little: https://www.publicchristianity.org/a-lot-with-a-little-part-i/  He Had a Dream: https://www.publicchristianity.org/he-had-a-dream/ One Giant Leap: https://www.publicchristianity.org/one-giant-leap/ Murder Most Popular: https://www.publicchristianity.org/murder-most-popular/ Fear Is a Useless Thing: https://www.publicchristianity.org/fear-is-a-useless-thing/  Missionary Doctor: https://www.publicchristianity.org/missionary-doctor/  Hey, It’s Your Girl Adeola: htt

Nobody ever remembers women writers - but playwright Jo Kadlecek wants to change that.  --- “In Parker’s case, I think creativity was a burden. I genuinely think she didn’t know what to do with it. She had these great outlets - helping start The New Yorker magazine, writing for Vanity Fair and for Vogue, writing poetry, being a theatre critic - but nothing fed her soul. It was a sad existence. She attempted suicide three or four times, and wrote a poem on suicide, and said it at a party with F. Scott Fitzgerald! What a conversation killer - no pun intended.”  A play that debuted at the 2019 Sydney Fringe Festival brought together three women who led strangely parallel lives, but (probably) never met: Dorothy L. Sayers, Dorothy Parker, and Dorothy Day. These remarkable women all wrote and worked from the 1920s on - but are largely and unjustly forgotten, says Jo Kadlecek, the woman behind the play Speak … Easy.  “That’s a line from the play: nobody ever remembers women writers." Jo has been a novelist, journal

Community , transcendence and the music of U2.   --- "Music's powerful. It's probably in all of us more than we realise. You'll be humming (the songs), you'll be thinking about them. So there is something I think is special about that art form, that it touches something very human and spiritual in everybody. And, I don't know, there's a great power that music has than maybe even watching opera, or reading a novel ... there's some portability of music. Not that you're carrying it around physically, but it's inside of you." What is it about music that is so emotionally powerful in matching and even shaping our moods? Can music change how we view each other and our place in the world? Scott Calhoun, creator of the U2 Conference, believes in the power of music to create community, an identity and a sense of emotional understanding. He thinks the ambiguity and mystery of the music of Irish rock band U2 helps explain the breadth of their appeal over four decades. Here Scott discusses the traditions of the psalms, g

Almost a quarter of young Australians struggle with their mental health, says Mission Australia. --- “I think my generation, everyone wants to have it all together. If you’re at university, you need to be working a really busy job, you need to be doing really well, you need to have a social life. And so then when you’re not okay, people are shocked and there’s a bit of shame attached to not being okay.” That’s Michelle Basson, a 20-year-old university student opening up on her experience of mental distress. Almost a quarter of young Australians struggle with their mental health, according to Can we talk? Seven year youth mental health report, a joint study by Mission Australia and the Black Dog Institute. That rise in mental health concerns represents a jump of 5.5 percent over the last seven years, with young women experiencing distress at twice the rate of young men.  In this episode of Life & Faith, we reflect on the report with Dr Jo Fildes, Head of Research and Evaluation at Mission Australia and psy

As a lawyer, Senator, then priest, Father Michael Tate has thought long and deeply about vocation. --- “Every time a new Australian takes the citizenship pledge, that’s a great moment for me, because I wrote it.”  Michael Tate has had many careers. In this episode of Life & Faith, he tells Natasha Moore about several transitions in his life: from a natural conservative to a staunch Labor Party member; from a student of law to the first Catholic to study theology at Oxford since the Reformation; from a Senator and Australian ambassador to the priesthood.  A horrific car accident, the Vietnam War, and a painting and a poem were among the triggers for each of Father Michael’s vocational changes. From conversations with Les Murray and Pope John Paul II to his optimism about the “commonwealth" that is Australia, he reflects on how a rich and varied life fits together into a kind of unity.  “I was reading a poem by W. H. Auden … When you appear before the judgment seat of God, God will recite, by heart, the poe

The McAlpine brothers have spent their lives navigating their similarities - and differences - and those of their various “tribes".    ---   "The twin thing is very important. And I understand that with my wife, who's also a twin - she has the same relationship with her twin: there's someone who's more important than your wife to you, who's your twin brother. And that's a funny concept to have, and a big part of our relationship. Our ‘twinniness’."   David and Stephen McAlpine are identical twins. They sound the same - but are very different! Stephen is a writer and a church pastor; David is a neuroscientist, and he’s not religious. They live in cities on opposite sides of Australia, and believe very different things about the world - but maintain the unique closeness of the twin relationship.    In this fraternal episode of Life & Faith, Stephen and David talk to Simon Smart about growing up between Australia and Northern Ireland - between the beach and a war zone, with complicated feelings about both pl

Australian actor Anna McGahan tells with searing honesty her story of fame, and of unexpected faith.  --- “It was, I suppose, a divorce that looked like an estrangement, and even a hatred. Just this sense of ‘I’m not at home in my body, I don’t like the way my body looks, and I don’t like the way my body feels, and I don’t like the fact that I’m stuck within it’.” Anna McGahan never really expected to be an actor - but after graduating, she landed a series of high-profile roles on TV shows like Underbelly, House Husbands, Anzac Girls, and The Doctor Blake Mysteries.  There was a dark side, though, to the glamour of her new life. In her newly published memoir Metanoia, Anna describes her struggles with self-worth, body image, relationships, and spiritual hunger, and how they led her to an unexpected place.  “It never occurred to me that I could be friends with Christians,” Anna laughs. But meeting some believers who didn’t fit with her mental image of Christianity kickstarted a journey for her that was to chan

International cricketer (and singer!) Henry Olonga tells the story of his stand against a dictator.  --- “More sinister was the idea that we were apologists for the Mugabe regime - that line was being blurred and so I felt, well, I’ve got to make it very clear where I stand on this … It was early February I think when we did the protest, the first match against Namibia in the World Cup of 2003. The rest is history.”  Former Test cricketer, and singer on The Voice Australia, Henry Olonga tells Life & Faith about his protest against Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe.  Playing for Zimbabwe in the Cricket World Cup in 2003, Olonga, along with teammate Andy Flower, wore a black armband to mourn the death of democracy in their country. It was a bold and costly decision. In this episode, Olonga tells the story of death threats, arrest warrants, and miraculous escapes, as well as the place of faith in engaging in the protest and coping with life in exile.  “How do you place a value on the black armband protest? O

A detective and a scholar tackle the question: why are we all so obsessed with crime stories? --- “When I was a child, not everything was a detective story. Now it is, on television. And it’s almost as if we all want to know, we want to know the big question: who did it??”  Judging by the perennial popularity of detective novels and crime shows, and the current wave of true crime podcasts, it’s not a stretch to call our culture murder-obsessed. Why are these stories so fascinating to us? Is there something wrong with us? It’s a topic writers have long been drawn to, in essays like George Orwell’s “Decline of the English Murder” and W. H. Auden’s “The Guilty Vicarage”. In this episode of Life & Faith, Natasha Moore speaks with literary scholar and theologian Alison Milbank about the hold these stories have over us - and also Jim Warner Wallace, who’s been dealing with the real thing for decades in his work as a cold case detective.  “When you knock on the door of the neighbour of a serial killer, they’re l

Porn has become a way of life for everyone—even for those who don’t view it. --- “I came to the realisation that what I was asking was not a sociological question, ‘what is pornography?’ It actually was a question of metaphysics, where reality lies.” What explains pornography’s pull? Is it just the sex? Or the way it ritualises the endless desire for more? In this episode of Life & Faith, Catholic theologian Matthew Tan offers a theological take on the phenomenon of porn. In swapping the actual for the possible, and the real for the unreal, Matt says porn plays out a metaphysical move that can be traced back to the twelfth century, and the musings of medieval theologians. What’s more, he says the insatiable desire for ‘more’ isn’t simply a feature of porn but permeates modern life. Food porn, FOMO, online dating, envying the Insta-worthy lives of others: all are driven by the same porn logic. --- Resources mentioned in this episode: Matthew John Paul Tan, Redeeming Flesh: The Way of the Cross with Zombie

How a not-neat Bible maps onto our not-neat lives.  --- "A text without a context is a pretext for whatever you want it to mean. When you do the chicken nugget thing and excerpt a verse, or a half a verse, or two verses, or three verses from its original context and don’t bother to try to find out what it meant in its original context - guess what, you are bound to twist that text.”  What happens when you read the Bible wrong? What happens when you read it right?  In the second part of this conversation about the best-selling book of all time, Bible scholars Darrell Bock and Ben Witherington III talk about some of the challenges of reading this text - and a few epic interpretative fails - and how it has helped them navigate the highs and lows of life, including the birth and death of a daughter.  “You look at life at the back side of a tapestry, and normally what we see is loose threads and knots. But occasionally the light shines through the tapestry and we see God’s larger design weaving together the darks

A series of voices on the many voices that make up the world’s best-selling book.  --- “It’s the most read, most owned, best-selling book of all time.”  The Bible has over the centuries seeped into our language, our stories, even what we value and imagine. It’s true to say that it’s the most read book of all time - but we could equally call it one of the most unread, and sometimes one of the most badly read.  In this two-part episode of Life & Faith, three passionate readers of the Bible - Ben Witherington III, Darrell Bock, and Sarah Golsby-Smith - explain what’s unexpected and even shocking about it, and what it means to live in a Jesus-haunted culture. Featuring the seasickness that comes from trying to navigate English literature without it, why the female heroes of the Bible are so appealing, and what a personal encounter with this very ancient and surprisingly modern book can be like. “Reading the Bible as literature - I actually think it saved my life. I can remember sitting in church in first-year

New York Rabbi Bob Kaplan on how to share a society with people you radically disagree with. ---  “Being a rabbi, I always kid around that I am a Hebrew school dropout. The rabbi and I only agreed upon one thing in Hebrew school: he didn't want me there and I didn't want to be there.” Bob Kaplan never expected to become a rabbi. In this episode of Life & Faith, he tells Simon and Natasha about growing up non-kosher in Brooklyn, how he once managed a New England ashram, and what he’s learned over decades of community building about living with the “other”.  Rabbi Bob has worked with police and educators, he’s spoken at the White House, been a grief counsellor after 9/11, and worked on mediation and conflict resolution from Belfast to Jerusalem. He has a highly developed sense of our proficiency as humans in the art of hating, and a lot of hope when it comes to the possibility of building a “shared society”.  “Respect is something that needs to be earned; dignity is God-given. And that means that when I tal

Valerie Browning on the choices that led to her life among the Afar nomads of the Ethiopian desert. --- “Why do you protect yourself? Life without risk is not life, it is simply not life.” Valerie Browning is a nurse and midwife who has spent the last 30 years among the Afar people of Ethiopia. She has endured civil war and snakebite, extreme heat and malaria, and nearly died in childbirth. She daily takes on the hardships confronting her people: famine, cholera, infant mortality, illiteracy, climate change, and the real causes of poverty.  It’s an unexpected path for someone who was born in England and grew up in country NSW. In this interview, Valerie explains what’s wonderful about Afar life, explains how she keeps going in the face of overwhelming need, and puts us all on the hook for the choices we make in our affluent Western context. “I see in the life of the Afar almost the life of the four Gospels. Where was Christ? Was he sitting in a very comfortable chair? Did he iron his clothes every day? Did he

Tim Costello on what resources we have in the face of overwhelming human need.  --- “So much of our experience is that there’s such goodness in people, and generosity. But when you see evil and look it in the eye, it’s overwhelming.”  From arguing with Vladimir Putin about political dissidents and the relationship of church and state, to witnessing the devastation of the 2004 tsunami or the power of forgiveness in post-genocide Rwanda, Tim Costello has had an inside view of some of the most fraught issues of our time.  In the second part of Simon Smart’s interview with the man who’s been called “Australia’s pastor”, Tim shares lessons from his time as CEO of World Vision Australia, including questions around suffering and trauma, what a reasonable refugee policy would look like, burnout, and what makes humanitarian efforts genuinely effective.  “Boil down all the books on development in all the libraries in the world - and there’s hundreds of thousands of volumes - they really come down to: what works? It’s r

Tim Costello, Australia’s favourite social justice advocate, looks back on a storied, surprising life. --- “I don’t think you ever understand your faith until you’re out of your own culture and have to see it through other cultural lenses … The Italian Baptists all voted communist. They believed the Christian Democrats, with the Mafia, with even the Catholic church, would never clean up corruption in Italy. Only a communist government would. And I just knew God was in heaven, Bob Menzies was in the lodge, and we Christians only voted Liberal, or conservative.”  The title of Tim Costello’s just-released memoir, A Lot with a Little, reflects his sense that the doors that have opened to him across his life have been more than he deserved. As a Baptist minister and lawyer, erstwhile mayor of St Kilda, and for many years CEO of World Vision Australia, his journey reflects his understanding that Christian faith is not a respectable, middle-class thing.  “So much of the Bible forces us to ask the questions of, who h

The untold story of what drove Vincent Lingiari to lead the Wave Hill walk-off. --- “Those stories are as true and as real as someone having the audacity to say ‘I have a dream’ that racism will be changed in the United States of America. They’re the sorts of dreams that would motivate a leader to hold an eight-year campaign as opposed to an eight-week campaign.” It’s been 53 years since Vincent Lingiari led 200 Gurundji people—Aboriginal stockmen, domestic workers, and their families—on a walk-off from the Wave Hill cattle station in protest against atrocious housing and working conditions, meagre provisions and unequal pay. That strike morphed into an eight-year campaign to reclaim the traditional lands of the Gurundji people, and one that was realised—symbolically, at least—when in 1975, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam poured red dirt into Vincent Lingiari’s hands in symbolic recognition of Indigenous sovereignty. The walk-off and the ensuing protest are now seen as the birth of the land rights movement in Au

Mark Greene on the frustrations, and the potential, of work in contemporary Western culture.  --- “It’s not at all clear to me that the way the work is currently being structured in Western culture is good for the majority of the people in it.”  Mark Greene grew up Jewish, and worked for a long time in advertising in London and New York. These days, he’s Executive Director of the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity, and he spends a lot of his time thinking, speaking, and writing about the nature of work - which also means, the nature of God, and humans, and our life together.  "Camus famously said: work is not everything, but when work sours, all life stifles and dies. I think people are created for purposeful activity.”  In this episode, Mark considers our problematic experience of work, shares three key things that the research suggests make work enriching rather than soul-destroying, and tells stories of workplaces that are doing things differently.  --- Mark was in Sydney in July 2019 as a keyn

Why might someone who’s not religious want to send their kids to a faith-based school?  --- “Teachers are one of the few groups of people in society who can tell other people what to do in their discretionary time and - by and large - they obey.”  Education is among our core activities as a society - so it’s unsurprising that it can be a battleground for all sorts of ideas.  David I. Smith is Professor of Education at Calvin University, and he has spent decades thinking about how education really forms people. He says that there’s no such thing as a “vanilla” or “neutral” education - and that even a maths or a French textbook will imply a whole way of seeing the world and other people.  “We spent a lot of time learning how to say in French and German, ‘This is my name. This is my favourite food. I like this music. I don’t like biology. This is what I did last weekend. I would like two train tickets to Hamburg. I would like the steak and fries. I would like a hotel room for two nights.’ So the implicit message

Two conversations, two stories of lives committed to justice and the flourishing of others.  --- “The rescue of one person matters infinitely - it matters to that person, and it matters to us - and at the same time, that one rescue can send a ripple effect through a system of millions of people who are enslaved and exploited.” In this episode of Life & Faith, we bring together two conversations with remarkable women working to bring justice to situations of terrible brokenness.  Bethany Hoang spent many years with International Justice Mission, an organisation seeking to fix broken justice systems, end slavery, and bring healing to its victims.  “The need is staggering when you really wade into these places of deep darkness - but when you see the rescue come it is just overwhelming, and you just want to see more and more of it and give your whole life to it.”  Ruth Padilla DeBorst is a theologian, wife and mother, educator and storyteller, based in Costa Rica. She’s committed to community development and