Life & Faith
Episodes
Thursday Oct 03, 2019
The Book of the People: Part 1
Thursday Oct 03, 2019
Thursday Oct 03, 2019
A series of voices on the many voices that make up the world’s best-selling book.
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“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 uni thinking I wish I got as much enjoyment out of reading the Bible as I do sitting in a lecture, listening to one of my professors talking about Hamlet … I think about the people who wrote the Scriptures, and the time and effort they put into making something beautiful so it could speak to us, and we read it like a recipe book! That to me seems like a crime.”
Thursday Sep 12, 2019
A Lot with a Little: Part II
Thursday Sep 12, 2019
Thursday Sep 12, 2019
Tim Costello on what resources we have in the face of overwhelming human need.
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“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 relationship. That your culture matters, that you have respect from us, that we will not take control of your life, but ask you what control and changes you want to make in your life. That takes time, and relationship.”
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Listen to Part I of this conversation: https://www.publicchristianity.org/a-lot-with-a-little-part-i/
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Thursday Sep 05, 2019
A Lot with a Little: Part I
Thursday Sep 05, 2019
Thursday Sep 05, 2019
Tim Costello, Australia’s favourite social justice advocate, looks back on a storied, surprising life.
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“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 has power in this society and gets what they want? And who doesn’t have power and misses out? … The Bible has Mary when she’s pregnant, the mother of Jesus, singing a song: ‘The rich have been sent away empty-handed and the poor have been fed.’ That Bible reading was banned in Guatemala because it was seen to incite subversion! For me, the Bible is absolutely personal and transformative, but it addresses, what are the barriers to this 'goodwill on earth’?”
This first part of an extended interview with the man who’s been called Australia’s favourite social justice activist - and who’s also the newest addition to the CPX team - covers some colourful stories from Tim's various careers, including his failed attempt to evangelise the lead singer of AC/DC, and the relationship that the journalist Philip Adams has called “the most interesting sibling rivalry since Cain and Abel”.
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Thursday Aug 29, 2019
He had a dream
Thursday Aug 29, 2019
Thursday Aug 29, 2019
The untold story of what drove Vincent Lingiari to lead the Wave Hill walk-off.
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“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 Australia.
Little is known, however, about the role Christian leaders played in the protest—a category that, it turns out, includes Vincent Lingiari.
And even less is known about the dreams Vincent Lingiari had that assured him that the land was promised to the Gurundji people.
Mark Yettica-Paulson is the son of Rev. Graham Paulson, the first Indigenous Baptist minister, and the man who baptised Vincent Lingiari.
In this episode of Life & Faith, Mark shares his father’s memories of Vincent Lingiari, and how the Gurundji leader came to be seen as Moses figure who led his people out of captivity to a land of their own.
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Thursday Aug 22, 2019
9 to 5
Thursday Aug 22, 2019
Thursday Aug 22, 2019
Mark Greene on the frustrations, and the potential, of work in contemporary Western culture.
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“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.
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Mark was in Sydney in July 2019 as a keynote speaker at the Work and Faith Conference. His books include Thank God It’s Monday and Of Love, Life and Caffè Latte.
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Thursday Aug 08, 2019
Rebroadcast: Just Women
Thursday Aug 08, 2019
Thursday Aug 08, 2019
Two conversations, two stories of lives committed to justice and the flourishing of others.
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“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 the flourishing of those who have been marginalised. She also has a very personal story of loss and injustice to tell.
“Many people said, ‘How can you still believe God is there, with something so terrible happening to you and your children?’ And actually, I experienced at that moment, in the middle of that loss, the sense of God’s presence, not just saying ‘I’m with you’, compassionately, but actually ‘I’m suffering with you.’”
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Thursday Aug 01, 2019
Glorious Ruins
Thursday Aug 01, 2019
Thursday Aug 01, 2019
Philosopher Steven Garber on how we see our world, and ourselves.
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“Though we mostly don’t talk this way or see things this way, I think we are all profound religious people in that deepest sense - we are homo adorans, to use the Latin here. We will care most about something, we will commit ourselves most deeply to something. Homo adorans: we will adore something, we’ll make something most important to us.”
Steven Garber is Professor of Marketplace Theology and Leadership at Regent College in Vancouver. In this conversation with Simon Smart, he manages to still some of the clamour of our world in order to understand what it’s like to be human in this time and place.
This episode of Life & Faith ranges far and wide - from karma to stoicism, from Vàclav Havel to Peter Singer, from the Smashing Pumpkins to U2, from amusing ourselves to death to the dark night of the soul, and what the biggest song on the biggest album of the year has to tell us about what it’s like to be young today. There’s something for everyone in Steven’s wise and warm observations about what we believe and desire, and why.
“I’ve been a great lover of U2’s music for many, many years now, and gone to many concerts, and even talked sometimes to some of the people in the band about what they do and why they do what they do … You can imagine people coming to these concerts and raising their plastic cups of Coors overhead and singing the songs of Zion - How long, O Lord, to sing this song - and you think, what have you guys done there, Bono and his buddies??”
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Buy Steven’s book Visions of Vocation: Common Grace for the Common Good: https://www.ivpress.com/visions-of-vocation
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Thursday Jul 25, 2019
Zombies, Faith, and Politics
Thursday Jul 25, 2019
Thursday Jul 25, 2019
Film and TV critic Alissa Wilkinson on the end of the world - as pop culture imagines it.
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“Dystopia is like the more woke version of utopia. It’s where we’re working out our biggest anxieties as a culture. For instance, does the human race deserve to continue? Or would it be better if we just went away?”
Alissa Wilkinson fell into film and television criticism after completing a degree in computer science – which she says actually helps her analyse culture well.
“I think my job is to watch a movie as well as I can, and then be able to look at my reaction to it as a good watcher and articulate why that reaction happened, and then also to make space for the reader to have their own experience with the work of art,” Alissa says.
“Sometimes [my job is] to just say ‘this is bad’ or ‘this is a masterpiece’, but if I don’t add the ‘why?’ then I’m not doing my job at all as a critic.”
She’s particularly fascinated by ‘“end of the world’” narratives and is the co-author of How to Survive the Apocalypse: Zombies, Cylons, Faith, and Politics at the End of the World.
In this episode, Alissa talks The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, Strangers Things and The Handmaid’s Tale – and how the dystopian futures we imagine more often than not tell us more about the society we live in today.
“The bigger question is, what would it take for us, as an enlightened and progressive society, to end up back in that kind of a place? The answer The Handmaid’s Tale gives is really sobering – if we take our eye off the ball, if we get too distracted by our own comfortable lives, little by little our our rights and freedoms that we enjoy can be chipped away.”
But it’s not all about death and destruction. Alissa also recognizses that in the doomsday narratives, there’s often something more going on.
“We’re brought into the story to recognise ourselves in it, and then this sort of mysterious, transcendent thing pops up, and it adds a new dimension to the story, but it also shows us that it’s something we’re really longing for.”
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READ Alissa Wilkinson’s articles for Vox: www.vox.com/authors/alissa-wilkinson
Get a copy of How to Survive the Apocalypse: Zombies, Cylons, Faith, and Politics at the End of the World: www.alissawilkinson.com/book
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Thursday Jul 18, 2019
One Giant Leap
Thursday Jul 18, 2019
Thursday Jul 18, 2019
50 years on from the moon landing seems like a good time to ask a few existential questions.
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“He said he could stand on the moon, look up to earth, and with this gloved hand hold up his thumb and cover the entire planet. Under his thumb - every mountain, every river, every city, every person he knew, all the people he didn’t ... It made him feel terrifyingly small and vulnerable.”
It’s 50 years since the Apollo 11 mission put humans on the moon for the first time.
It was an event that captured the imagination of people across the world, and successive generations since. Four days after blasting off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the crew radioed to Mission Control in Houston: “The Eagle has landed.” In the stillness following the landing, before taking communion with bread and wine he had brought specially for the occasion, lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin sent this message back to Earth:
“I’d like to take this opportunity to ask every person listening in, whoever and wherever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours and to give thanks in his or her own way.”
In this celebratory episode of Life & Faith, Simon Smart asks some existential questions about the universe and our place in it, and our tendency to reach for the spiritual to make sense of such moments of wonder and awe. In conversation with CPX resident philosopher Richard Shumack, he muses on why the moon landing so captivated them as children. And Andrew Smith, author of Moondust: In Search of the Men who Fell to Earth, talks to Simon about how the moonwalkers were changed by the experience, and how they’ve coped with being earthbound in the decades since.
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Referenced in this episode:
Andrew Smith, Moondust: In Search of the Men who Fell to Earth
Frank Cottrell Boyce, Cosmic
Audio courtesy of NASA
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Thursday Aug 02, 2018
Same Species, Bigger Sticks
Thursday Aug 02, 2018
Thursday Aug 02, 2018
Is the human race on an inevitable trajectory onward and upward? Not quite, says Nick Spencer.
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"We are the same species but with bigger sticks, and those sticks can be used to reach further and achieve more - but they can conversely be used to beat a lot more people. That is precisely the point. Were we to find ourselves under the same pressures of resource scarcity that our ancestors endured every single day, we would probably find ourselves less moral than we think ourselves to be."
Is the world a better place to live today than it has ever been before? Some would answer this question with a resounding yes – like Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard. His latest book, Enlightenment Now: The case for reason, science, humanism, and progress, charts improvements over time across a whole range of markers – life expectancy, child mortality, wealth and poverty, war and violence, and more – and one of the central claims of his book is that we owe all this progress to the Enlightenment.
Nick Spencer, Director of Research at Theos Think Tank in the UK and author of The Evolution of the West: How Christianity has shaped our values, says that there’s more to the story of the human race.
"The beef I have with Steven Pinker is that he traces all good things to the Enlightenment and no bad things to it," Nick Spencer says, "and as soon as you do that, you’re almost invariably oversimplifying history for your own purposes."
In the episode, we look at the positives of the Enlightenment, as well as some of its more ambiguous elements.
"You can certainly see an enormous potential for human moral progress," he says, "but you have that twin fear of technological progress that seems to continue apace, with the more ambiguous form of moral progress that may or may not happen." "The worst possible scenario is a coincidence of significant technological progress and development with moments of human fallibility – if you get that, which is what you did get in the 1930s and 40s, the scene is not a happy one."
But even as a self-confessed "glass half-empty" person, Nick Spencer has hope for humanity, which is rooted in his Christian faith.
"I think that the human person has a malleability, a creative fluidity … the person is responsive to love," he says. "I think, therefore, the person can be redeemed through responding to the love of God, and that means the person’s future can be redeemed and can 'progress' – it can blossom and flourish in a way that it might not otherwise."
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WATCH Nick Spencer debate Steven Pinker on the future of humanity: http://bit.ly/2LI2S1e
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