Life & Faith
Episodes
Thursday Mar 11, 2021
Seen & Heard
Thursday Mar 11, 2021
Thursday Mar 11, 2021
The CPX team debrief on their latest reads, TV binges, and podcast discoveries.
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It may not surprise you to know that the nerds at CPX spend a lot of time inhaling the books, movies, podcasts, and binge-worthy TV series that shape and reflect our particular cultural moment - and debriefing on them around the proverbial office water cooler.
This week on Life & Faith, Simon, Natasha, and Justine hit record on that conversation.
Covered in this episode:
Priestdaddy: the 2017 memoir by Patricia Lockwood, “poet laureate of Twitter”, whose father - a Catholic priest, via a loophole in the usual rules about celibacy - is a larger-than-life figure … like everyone else in her family, it seems. Hilarious and also disturbing, on growing up religious and continuing to love complicated people whose faith you no longer share.
The Stand: a new 9-episode miniseries based on the 1978 Stephen King novel, available to watch on Amazon Prime, this dark fantasy/post-apocalyptic tale rejects the greys in favour of good ol’ black-and-white moral absolutes. Mother Abagail vs The Dark Man represents a traditional battle of good and evil, but sits oddly in the current atmosphere.
Renegades: Born in the USA: the new podcast on Spotify brings together two American icons, Bruce Springsteen and Barack Obama, to talk about life parallels, race, and the ongoing promise and peril of the “American dream”.
Thursday Dec 03, 2020
What love looks like
Thursday Dec 03, 2020
Thursday Dec 03, 2020
Three stories of ordinary people, and the extraordinary care they take of people in their lives.
For 11 years, Diana Aitken has been part of the soup kitchen at St Matthew’s Anglican Church in Manly, where a community of care has sprung up that goes far beyond the lavish meals served every Monday night.
Issam Khoury cared for his wife Irene during her long struggle with polycystic liver and kidney disease, and throughout her transplant journey.
Carolyn Stedman, 74, has fostered 74 children over 45 years. While she has no intention of stopping, saying goodbye to these children can be gut-wrenching.
The work of care doesn’t tend to grab the headlines, but in this episode of Life & Faith, we shine the spotlight on three ordinary people who take extraordinary care of the people in their lives.
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READ:
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
Thursday Nov 21, 2019
The Poems You Could Have Written
Thursday Nov 21, 2019
Thursday Nov 21, 2019
As a lawyer, Senator, then priest, Father Michael Tate has thought long and deeply about vocation.
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“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 poems you could have written. And you will cry tears of shame. Well, that hit me like a grenade thrown at me. Was I going to be crying tears of shame on my deathbed because I didn’t have the courage or the guts to write the ‘poem' which God always intended me to write?”
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 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 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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SUBSCRIBE to Life & Faith on Apple Podcasts: http://bit.ly/cpxpodcast
OR on Spotify: http://cpx.video/spotify
FIND US on Facebook: www.facebook.com/publicchristianity
FOLLOW US on Twitter: www.twitter.com/cpx_tweet
VISIT our website: www.publicchristianity.org
Thursday May 03, 2018
REBROADCAST: The Long Shadow of Slavery
Thursday May 03, 2018
Thursday May 03, 2018
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."
Trayvon Martin. Michael Brown. Alton Sterling. These are names familiar across the world: the names of African-American men – three of many – who died after being shot by white men. Those who shot them have all been acquitted of their deaths, sparking national outrage and re-igniting the old debate on racial profiling and civil rights.
In this episode of Life & Faith, we asked Professor Albert J. Raboteau from Princeton University, an expert in the African-American religious experience, to walk 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 in cinemas from May 9. Buy tickets, or host your own screening: www.betterandworse.film
Professor Albert J. Raboteau's latest book, American ProphetsSeven Religious Radicals and Their Struggle for Social and Political Justice, is available to purchase here: www.press.princeton.edu/titles/10655.html
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SUBSCRIBE to ‘Life & Faith’ on Apple Podcasts: http://bit.ly/cpxpodcast
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This episode of Life & Faith was first broadcast on 2 March 2017.