Life & Faith
Episodes
Thursday Nov 05, 2020
Choosing My Religion
Thursday Nov 05, 2020
Thursday Nov 05, 2020
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 percent of the world’s population is affiliated with a religion - but Canadian scholar John G. Stackhouse Jr would say that 100 percent of us are religious. His latest book, Can I Believe? Christianity for the Hesitant, invites us all to consider what we believe and why - and explains how he thinks the weirdness of Christianity fits the weirdness of the world as it really is.
“If you think, for instance, of atomic and sub-atomic physics, think of certain forms of cosmology - there are all sorts of theories that I barely can even articulate, let alone understand, but I'm told by smart people that this is the best way to construe the data even though it's in many cases counter-intuitive. But they've tried the obvious explanations and they don't work as well as this really strange one. And that's what I think is the case with Christianity.”
Thursday Oct 29, 2020
The Cost of Compassion
Thursday Oct 29, 2020
Thursday Oct 29, 2020
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 political stand by appealing to compassion. So it is the universal benchmark - and yet, we still divide. And often divide quite bitterly.”
Tim Costello has spent decades trying to understand compassion - what it is, how it works - and also trying to live it out. His new book in CPX’s Re:CONSIDERING series is called The Cost of Compassion, and it sums up the lessons of a lifetime working with and for the vulnerable.
In this conversation, Tim tackles a few of the big questions: why is compassion so complicated? In an age of news overload, what do we do about compassion fatigue? And who is compassion for - who benefits from compassion, and who gets to show it to others?
“The misunderstanding that we often have about poverty and wealth is that people in extreme poverty are only recipients. I’d worked as a Baptist minister in St Kilda, and I’d discovered in an Aboriginal woman called Eva, who was the Mother Teresa of the streets of St Kilda - her giving away her last dollars, even though her pension cheque wouldn’t come for a week and she didn’t know how she was going to eat. And her joy - she had a Christian faith, she suffered from schizophrenia … she was a classic street woman, and she was the model of Jesus. So I actually knew this, in the joy in her life and the utter poverty by Australian standards of her life, even before I joined World Vision.”
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Buy The Cost of Compassion: https://www.reconsidering.com.au/
Thursday Oct 22, 2020
An Evangelical Election
Thursday Oct 22, 2020
Thursday Oct 22, 2020
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 2020.
We ask what ‘evangelical’ even means, and consider the possibility that Donald Trump acts as a kind of representative - even a strongman - for evangelicals who feel increasingly out of step with the secular mainstream.
We explore how race factors into the mix as well, and questions of power and influence.
Again, we’re joined by experts from the US to weigh in on the discussion: Amy Black, Professor of Political Science at Wheaton College in Illinois; Lisa Sharon Harper, author, activist, and the founder and president of Freedom Road; Andy Crouch, author, speaker, and the former editor of Christianity Today, America’s flagship evangelical magazine.
In this episode, we also hear from Kristin Kobes du Mez, Professor of History at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the author of Jesus and John Wayne: How white evangelicals corrupted a faith and fractured a nation.
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Explore
Kristin Kobes du Mez’s book Jesus and John Wayne: How white evangelicals corrupted a faith and fractured a nation
Lisa Sharon Harper’s book The Very Good Gospel: How everything wrong can be made right
Amy Black’s book Honoring God in Red or Blue: Approaching politics with humility, grace, and reason
Andy Crouch’s book Playing God: Redeeming the gift of power
Elisabeth Dias’ New York Times article ‘Christianity will have power’
Pew Research’s report indicating as many as 80% of white evangelicals would still vote for Donald Trump
Thursday Oct 15, 2020
Divided States of America
Thursday Oct 15, 2020
Thursday Oct 15, 2020
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 the way the breakdown of social trust, as well trust in institutions, makes this the most unpredictable election ever.
We talk to Amy Black, Professor of Political Science at Wheaton College, Illinois; Andy Crouch, author speaker, and former editor of Christianity Today, North America’s flagship evangelical magazine; and Lisa Sharon Harper, author, speaker, and founder and president of Freedom Road, a consultancy training churches and other organisations in racial justice.
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Explore
Andy Crouch’s book Playing God: Redeeming the gift of power
Our full interview with David Smith, Senior Lecturer in American Politics and Foreign Policy, at the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney
Robert Putnam’s book American Grace: How religion divides and unites us
The full audio of Tim Dixon’s 2019 Richard Johnson Lecture: Crossing the Great Divide - Building bridges in an age of tribalism. Audio of the Q&A session is also available.
Thursday Aug 27, 2020
The Muslim Jesus
Thursday Aug 27, 2020
Thursday Aug 27, 2020
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 choose what he's like … you just have to meet the person on their own terms, taking them as they come.”
Years ago, when he was living and working with a Muslim community in Melbourne, Richard Shumack ran into a friend outside the local gym. The guy was wearing a T-shirt that read I LOVE JESUS on the front, and on the back BECAUSE I’M A MUSLIM AND SO WAS HE.
Many people would be surprised to hear that in Islam, Jesus is revered as one of the prophets. Richard’s new book is called Jesus through Muslim Eyes, and in its pages he sets out to meet the Muslim Jesus.
In this episode, Richard explains what the Muslim Jesus and the Christian Jesus have in common, how they’re different, and why it matters. Simon and Natasha also hear from Abdu Murray, an author and speaker with RZIM who has looked at Jesus through Muslim eyes and through Christian eyes.
“Sometimes we made fun of it. Sometimes we thought, Those foolish Christians. How could they believe that a person who is trapped in a human body that needs to walk to get where it needs to go to and sweats and eats, and then eventually dies at the hands of the creation he created, how could this be the incarnation of God, the Almighty?”
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Buy Jesus through Muslim Eyes
Thursday Aug 20, 2020
Care in a time of Covid
Thursday Aug 20, 2020
Thursday Aug 20, 2020
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 while also home-schooling and parenting children.
That’s also on top of any housework that needs doing—and, before COVID, Australian women already did roughly double the amount as men. Shutdown has mirrored these trends, according to a study of family life in lockdown from the University of Melbourne.
In this episode of Life & Faith, we speak to Devi Abraham, a Melbourne-based writer, podcaster, and mum to two boys. She tells us what it’s like to go back into lockdown to fight COVID’s second wave, and how she is approaching it differently this time.
We also hear from Natalie Ray, a mum and Christian minister in Sydney’s leafy north-west. She reflects on the ways that work often relies upon the flexibility of women to manage their schedules amidst the demands of family life.
Being a minister, Natalie also has a few thoughts on why Christians, of all people, should value care. Hint: it’s got something to do with Jesus.
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Read:
Professor Lyn Craig on how little we value ‘women’s work’
Annabel Crabb on how Covid-19 has left women anxious and overworked
George Megalogenis on the “pink-collar recession”
Watch:
Annabel Crabb in conversation with George Megalogenis about her book The Wife Drought at The Wheeler Centre
Connect:
Contact Devi through her website, or through Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter
Thursday Aug 13, 2020
The Pleasures of Pessimism
Thursday Aug 13, 2020
Thursday Aug 13, 2020
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 of Pessimism. They cover why we enjoy thinking about the end of the world, how they think they’d do in the event of civilisational collapse, and whether they consider themselves optimists or pessimists.
Mark Stephens, CPX colleague and expert on the apocalyptic biblical book of Revelation, stops by to talk about uses and abuses of that influential text. And we draft in thinkers like Steven Pinker, Alain de Botton, and Nick Spencer to help us weigh the idea of progress and whether everything is getting better and better – or worse and worse.
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Buy The Pleasures of Pessimism here: https://www.koorong.com/product/the-pleasures-of-pessimism-re-considering-series-natasha_9780647530757
Watch the full Munk Debate on Progress here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUmBWB54riE&t=35s
Listen to the full discussion with Nick Spencer “Same Species, Bigger Sticks” here: https://www.publicchristianity.org/same-species-bigger-sticks/
Thursday Jul 30, 2020
The ‘original sin’ of America - and Australia
Thursday Jul 30, 2020
Thursday Jul 30, 2020
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 you call something sinful, you’re speaking to a transcendent moral norm. As a person of faith, I think that what America does isn’t simply wrong to other human beings. It offends God himself,” says Esau McCaulley, an Assistant Professor of New Testament at Wheaton College in Illinois, and the author of the forthcoming Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope.
In this episode of Life & Faith, we explore the crossover between the metaphor of ‘original sin’ in discussions of racial injustice and the Jewish and Christian idea of human brokenness found right at the beginning of the Bible. Not only does the metaphor invoke collective wrongdoing, but questions of justice and restitution.
We also invite Ray Minniecon, a descendant of the Karbi Karbi and Gurang Gurang peoples, an Aboriginal pastor and activist, to examine Australia’s complicity in a similar, but different, ‘original sin’: the dispossession of the indigenous people of Australia.
“We’ve been living these lies for far too long,” Ray said, citing the declaration, not overturned until 1992 with the Mabo Decision, that Australia was terra nullius or ‘empty land’.
“Until those lies are addressed, which are the sins of the nation, then how on earth can we start to work out a better future?”
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Read Esau McCaulley’s New York Times opinion piece ‘What the Bible has to Say About Black Anger’
Buy Esau McCaulley’s forthcoming book Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope
Follow Esau McCaulley on Twitter
Listen to Ray Minniecon discuss self-determination and sacrifice on Speaking Out at the ABC
Thursday Jun 11, 2020
Rebroadcast: The Long Shadow of Slavery
Thursday Jun 11, 2020
Thursday Jun 11, 2020
A confronting - and deeply personal - look at the roots of racial division in the US.
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“We still live under the long shadow of the plantation. Indeed, freedoms have been spread to a larger group of people over time, but that spread has been at the cost of ongoing oppression of black people in ways that have become very apparent thanks to video cams and cell phones that betray the brutality of the police state that we sometimes live in as black people.”
With the events of recent weeks – the Death of George Floyd, the Black lives matter protests all over the U.S. and around the world, including here in Australia, we felt this episode would be a good one to revisit.
When we first posted it, we were reflecting on the death of black teenager Travon Martin at the hands of George Zimmerman and the fallout from that tragedy. Sadly, it seems not much has changed.
In this episode of Life & Faith, Professor Albert J. Raboteau from Princeton University, an expert in the African-American religious experience, walks us through the history of race relations in the US, and the deep roots of racial division – from the plantations to the Black Lives Matter movement today.
But he’s not just an expert – Professor Raboteau has lived the reality of racism as well:
“My father was killed by a white man in Mississippi, three months before I was born. The white man who killed him was never tried. He claimed self-defence and he wasn’t indicted even. … When I was 17 and getting ready to go off to college, [my mother and stepfather] sat me down and, for the first time, explained to me what had happened. They said, ‘The reason we didn’t tell you before was we didn’t want you to grow up hating white people’.”
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For The Love of God: How the church is better and worse than you ever imagined is available here: https://www.publicchristianity.org/fortheloveofgod/
Thursday Jun 04, 2020
We are all Christian now!
Thursday Jun 04, 2020
Thursday Jun 04, 2020
Author Tom Holland explores the revolutionary and enduring influence of Christianity.
British writer, Tom Holland, has written many books, both fiction and non-fiction, on subjects ranging from dinosaurs to medieval history to vampires!
His latest book Dominion: The making of the Western Mind is a 500-page masterpiece. It's a story of how we came to be what we are, and how we think the way that we do. It recounts the history and enduring influence of Christianity.
Holland is not a believer himself but argues that our western moral and social instincts are traced inexorably to early Christianity and the writings of the Apostle Paul. “I can't think of any piece of writing that has kind of had a more seismic influence on the world, almost everything that makes the Western society what it is and certainly makes me what I am, when I trace it back, it goes back basically to Paul,” says Holland.
Dominion by Tom Holland