Life & Faith
Episodes
Thursday Apr 30, 2020
Covid Costs, Questions and Community
Thursday Apr 30, 2020
Thursday Apr 30, 2020
We might be “all in this together” but what does the Covid19 crisis mean for those on the margins of society?
In this Life & Faith Simon Smart and Tim Costello discuss the impact of the Coronavirus on individuals and communities. Will it change our priorities and what will be the lasting impact? Tim considers the very real and detrimental effect of the economic downturn on the charity sector. And Simon and Tim talk to Neil Smith from Planet Shakers church in Melbourne about their “Empower” initiative that provides food and necessities for people in need and in a manner that gives them dignity and agency. Neil explains how demand for their services has spiked and how they’ve welcomed some unexpected clients in recent days.
Tim's article in the Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/30/we-need-to-be-physically-distant-but-we-need-to-share-our-collective-pain
Planetshakers Empower:
https://www.empoweraustralia.com.au/
Thursday Apr 02, 2020
A Reason to Run
Thursday Apr 02, 2020
Thursday Apr 02, 2020
A story of world records, and navigating a neurotypical world of work.
“I used to think why are we so similar and yet our lives have turned out quite differently? I thought that she was just introverted at the time. Now, looking back, I can see how some of her autistic challenges were not being properly addressed, not being properly understood … I could see a missed opportunity for people like her, that are being left out of the workplace but have amazing strengths that could be deployed with a bit of appropriate structure around them.”
In this episode of Life & Faith, Simon Smart speaks to Mike Tozer, founder and CEO of Xceptional. This unique company began by offering employment for people with autism, but then developed into a recruitment and placement service, finding roles for people with autism in companies that really need the skills they can provide.
Mike is also a world record-holder, although for quite an unusual record - running a half-marathon in a business suit! And his motivation to raise awareness this way was very personal: both his sister and his son have autism.
Creativity in the face of challenge. The ability to turn difficult situations to excellent outcomes. Mike’s story is one for all of us in the strange days we’re living in.
An interesting side-note: one of Mike’s employees, Tim, was recently featured in the ABC series Employable Me. Take a look via the link below.
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Xceptional:Xceptional
Employable Me: ABC Employable Me and Northern Pictures
Photo Cred: Drew Grigg, YetAnotherIdea
Thursday Mar 12, 2020
Out of the Fishbowl
Thursday Mar 12, 2020
Thursday Mar 12, 2020
A poet tells the story of his faith unravelling - and being woven together again.
“One of my favourite sayings in the world, ’The fish in the bowl doesn’t know that it’s wet’ - that helped me to look back upon the fishbowl that I’d been swimming in.”
Performance poet Joel McKerrow’s recently published book Woven is not a book of cookie-cutter spirituality. It’s not a book of answers, or programmable spiritual growth. It’s a question, an invitation, a beckoning toward movement.
In this refreshingly honest conversation with Joel, he looks back on the lost faith of his childhood and the grief associated with that loss - and also recounts how he regained his faith, this time a richer and more holistic, robust version. It’s a conversation about restoration and rebuilding of broken things, and how the rebuilt thing is stronger and able to weather the storms of life.
Check out Joel's book Woven: A Faith For the Dissatisfied
Thursday Feb 06, 2020
Misadventures in Wellness
Thursday Feb 06, 2020
Thursday Feb 06, 2020
Yoga, mindfulness, and detox diets: religion for those who’d never be caught dead in a church?
“Not everyone who goes to yoga is a spiritual seeker, but there is a lot of it (in yoga). I think yoga can make you start thinking about things, but it’s not really enough to fill that hole.”
Brigid Delaney is a columnist with The Guardian and the author of Wellmania: Misadventures in the Search for Wellness, in which she recounts her attempt to become clean, lean, and serene through an extreme detox diet, daily yoga practice, and meditation.
But Brigid also grew up Catholic. While she’s long been disenchanted with the church, that religious backstory gives her a unique take on wellness culture. She claims that for many young women, yoga is a form of ‘religion-lite’: a practice that addresses the spiritual yearning of those untethered from organised religion.
Brigid’s account of wellness culture is haunted by religion in other ways as well. At points in Wellmania, she seems to indirectly quote the Bible.
“Maybe I’ve been plagiarising, unintendedly plagiarising the Bible in my work. Or maybe I just listened to enough of it as a kid that it has seeped into some of my thinking.”
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Brigid Delaney’s Diary
Losing my religion: after the Pell verdict, the conflict for Catholics
It’s not you, Bill, it’s the country: is this election Australia’s Trump or Brexit moment?
Buy Wellmania: Misadventures in the Search for Wellness
Thursday Dec 19, 2019
Best in Show
Thursday Dec 19, 2019
Thursday Dec 19, 2019
The CPX team bring you a highlights reel of the year that was.
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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.
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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: https://www.publicchristianity.org/hey-its-your-girl-adeola/
Twinning: https://www.publicchristianity.org/twinning/
Sister Act: https://www.publicchristianity.org/sister-act/
Space for the Sacred: https://www.publicchristianity.org/space-for-the-sacred/
Thursday Nov 14, 2019
Twinning
Thursday Nov 14, 2019
Thursday Nov 14, 2019
The McAlpine brothers have spent their lives navigating their similarities - and differences - and those of their various “tribes".
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"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 places - and their experiences of navigating tribes and personal identity, both religious and political. The brothers reflect on how the spectre of loss acts on a relationship this intimate, and also what frustrates them about each other’s beliefs.
"'Religion is a home game as we say, not an away game, in Northern Ireland. But it's also that the divide isn't between those who are perhaps Christian, and those who maybe are not believers. But what type of Christian are you on the spectrum, and are you the 'good-living' type, which means you go to church, or are you just the normal who is a cultural Christian?”
Thursday Nov 07, 2019
Memoir of a Body
Thursday Nov 07, 2019
Thursday Nov 07, 2019
Australian actor Anna McGahan tells with searing honesty her story of fame, and of unexpected faith.
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“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 change fundamentally how she related to spirituality, work, art - and especially her own body.
“I remember so clearly this one scripture. I took it completely out of context, but Jesus is chatting to a whole bunch of people and he tells them, ‘You are the light of the world’. I read that and I took it to heart immediately - not because I felt like it validated my point of view about myself, but because I had never heard words like that spoken over my life. I had never considered that I could be a force of goodness or light or kindness. I just wasn’t. It permeated me. And what’s more, it permeated my body.”
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Check out Anna’s book Metanoia: A Memoir of a Body, Born Again
Thursday Oct 24, 2019
Murder Most Popular
Thursday Oct 24, 2019
Thursday Oct 24, 2019
A detective and a scholar tackle the question: why are we all so obsessed with crime stories?
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“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 likely to say, ‘Oh I’m so glad you’re taking that guy to jail, that guy is crazy - I mean it smells bad over there, there’s all kinds of weird noises, he’s always digging holes in his backyard’ … When you think of my kinds of cases, you knock on the neighbour’s door and tell them ‘I’m taking your neighbour to jail for this case from 30 years ago’, they’ll generally say, ‘No, I’ve known that guy for 30 years, he’s a great guy. No way could he have done that.’”
From our deepest convictions about human nature to how you can tell if a suspect might be lying, this episode delves into the appeal of the murder mystery, and also unfolds the surprising story of how Jim came to apply his particular skill-set to the truth claims of the Christian faith.
“All of my cases, I call these ‘death by a thousand paper cuts’ - cases where you’ve got 80 pieces of evidence that point to this suspect. Any one of those pieces of evidence I’m not sure I would want to go to trial with … but when you have all 80 and they point to the same reasonable inference, this is now heavy and weighty. And that’s where I was with the Gospels.”
Thursday Oct 17, 2019
Theology in Pornland
Thursday Oct 17, 2019
Thursday Oct 17, 2019
Porn has become a way of life for everyone—even for those who don’t view it.
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“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.
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Resources mentioned in this episode:
Matthew John Paul Tan, Redeeming Flesh: The Way of the Cross with Zombie Jesus.
www.awkwardasiantheologian.com
Thursday Oct 10, 2019
The Book of the People: Part II
Thursday Oct 10, 2019
Thursday Oct 10, 2019
How a not-neat Bible maps onto our not-neat lives.
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"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 and the lights of life.”
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Books mentioned in this episode:
Ben Witherington and Ann Witherington, When a Daughter Dies: Walking the way of grace in the midst of our grief
Ben Witherington III, Reading and Understanding the Bible
Darrell Bock, Can I Trust the Bible?