Life & Faith
Episodes
Thursday Apr 09, 2020
An Uncommon Instinct
Thursday Apr 09, 2020
Thursday Apr 09, 2020
This Easter, we encounter incredible stories of forgiveness in the face of unimaginable suffering.
Early in 2020, Australians everywhere were shaken by the awful news of the tragic death of four children - three siblings and one cousin - in Western Sydney, mown down by an alleged drunk driver while on their way to buy ice cream one summer evening.
But what struck everyone was the response of the parents of three of the children, Daniel and Leila Abdallah. Though devastated, Leila said that she wanted to forgive the driver. She refused to hate him. “That’s not who we are,” she said.
That instinct to forgive is not quick or easy for most of us.
In this episode of Life & Faith, we hear from Kylie Beach, a journalist from Christian newspaper Eternity, who reported on a prayer vigil for the Abdallah children. While there, she met Daniel and Leila, and was struck with their ability to comfort others, even in the midst of their heartbreak.
We also meet Anba Angaelos, the Coptic Orthodox Archbishop of London. He shares the terrible story of the 21 men - 20 of them Egyptian Coptic Christians - kidnapped and then beheaded by ISIL on a Libyan beach in 2015.
The two stories of tragedy could hardly be more different. But they share - along with the Easter story - an impulse to forgiveness in the midst of terrible suffering.
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Read:
Kylie Beach’s article in Eternity
Martin Mosebach’s book The 21: A journey into the land of Coptic martyrs
Thursday Jun 06, 2019
Sister Act
Thursday Jun 06, 2019
Thursday Jun 06, 2019
Life & Faith hears from two young women who’ve made some very counter-cultural choices.
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“Sometimes we’ve been mistaken for many other things. We have a convent in New York City, and one night our Sisters were walking on the streets, back to one of our convents. A group approached them and said, ‘Hey Sisters, what’s the show on Broadway tonight?’ I mean, you see a lot of things in New York, and we’re just part of it. Then we were in Sydney too, a little girl boarded a bus one day when there were a few of us on, and said, ‘Look Mum, all these women are getting married today.’ You know, so it’s a sight unseen.”
Sister Jean Marie and Sister Mary Grace are Sisters of Life. They’ve taken vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience – the vows that nuns have taken for centuries – as well as an extra vow, to protect and enhance the sacredness of every human life.
Their order is often described as “pro-life”, but Sister Mary Grace says she likes to think of their work as radically “pro-woman”, supporting mothers and pregnant women who feel that their choices are limited by offering them practical help, and unconditional love.
In this episode of Life & Faith, we hear from two young women who’ve made very counter-cultural choices: opting for commitment in an age of keeping your options open; celibacy in an age obsessed with sex and romance; communal living in an age of atomisation and loneliness; a life of prayer in an age that pursues productivity and efficiency. What could lead someone to make that kind of choice?
“Ultimately, what I've discovered in joining the Sisters of Life is that love desires to commit. Just last August I professed my first vows, and that day was like a wedding day for me. It was really an experience of freedom. I think love ultimately desires to give itself away to the beloved, to the other person that is loved.”
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Thursday May 16, 2019
This Side of the Wall
Thursday May 16, 2019
Thursday May 16, 2019
Checkpoints, borders, normalcy, and hope: a sketch of daily life in the West Bank.
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Areej Masoud lives in Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus. In terms of physical distance, it’s very close to Jerusalem. In terms of social reality, it’s a world away.
“If I want to go to Jerusalem, I need to get a permit. It’s not like I want to go, and I just start my car and leave. I would have to go through the pedestrian walk, and to do that I need to get a permit. The permit is not like a visa with clear criteria why you get it, why you don’t get it. I would need to go to a military base to request that, and you most probably won’t get it. But if you do, you need to go and wait at the checkpoint … it’s very humiliating.”
Areej is a Palestinian Christian, which means she belongs to a people who once made up 30 per cent of the population. These days, they make up less than 1 per cent of those living on the West Bank.
"I always felt jealous of other Christians, where their worst enemy could be their neighbour, or their ex-best friend. I do have an enemy, and that enemy is causing the persecution of myself and my people. Loving my enemy does have a different meaning, and that’s only when I was able to live both of my identities together. When you are not able to live that, like loving your enemy, you can’t consider yourself a Christian.”
The Arab-Israeli situation is among the world’s most intractable conflicts. It’s enormously complicated, and a minefield of a political issue.
In this episode of Life & Faith, Simon talks to someone who lives those tensions every day, and tries to navigate them using Jesus’ words about peacemaking and love of enemies as a compass. Areej shares stories of what life is like for her people: Can you be sure water is going to come out of the tap? How do you hold down a job? How do you travel when you’re not allowed near your country’s airport? And why would someone actively choose to live under these kinds of pressures?
"Hope is something not to be taken for granted: we have to have it each morning. Hope is when you know what your mission is and where you’re heading to and who you are, and what is your community and what they mean to you, and what you mean to them.
It’s like waking up in the morning knowing you are going to have a bad day, but then deciding you are going to have hope, create hope. And if you don't have it that day, you know someone else found it for you and with you, and they will share that with you.”
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Thursday Apr 18, 2019
Lifting the lid on Easter
Thursday Apr 18, 2019
Thursday Apr 18, 2019
The CPX team talk through fresh angles on the old story as they write for the media this Easter.
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What place - beyond public holidays and Cadbury Creme Eggs - does Easter occupy in our cultural imagination? Doing “public Christianity” means joining up the dots between the Christian story and what life is actually like in the 21st century, and festivals like Christmas and Easter are key moments for this kind of translation work.
In this episode of Life & Faith, members of the CPX team talk through the ideas they’re working on for articles and radio programs this Easter - and in the process, cover the three major phases of Easter.
Justine takes Lent, and talks about distraction and what the ripple effects of giving up Netflix might be for our lives. Simon frets about whether we’re getting worse at friendship across lines of disagreement, and how the death of Jesus on Good Friday challenges our increasingly polarised culture. And Natasha looks to Easter Sunday and what fairies, myths, and the human bent for the supernatural have to do with the resurrection.
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Thursday Apr 04, 2019
Ethics of What We Eat
Thursday Apr 04, 2019
Thursday Apr 04, 2019
A philosopher and a butcher dig into what we should and shouldn’t eat, and why.
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“As society has shifted away from being in close proximity to farms and food production, people are increasingly concerned about where their food’s coming from - the condition under which animals are raised and reared, and certain farming practices, [such as] pesticide use and the effects that that may have on the environment as well as on human health.”
Philosopher and sociologist Chris Mayes has thought about eating a lot more than most of us (which if we’re honest, is already quite a bit). The ethics of food involves a whole raft of factors: not only the treatment of animals and the environmental impact of production, but also the treatment of workers and the impact of the growth of pastoral land on indigenous peoples.
“In Australia it seems natural that we would have sheep, and natural that wheat would be here, but in thinking of the obviousness of those practices and products here, we forget their role in dispossessing indigenous Australians - the way that the expansion of sheep, particularly throughout NSW and Victoria in the early to mid-nineteenth century, was coinciding with a lot of these most brutal massacres.”
Chris considers what it means for lamb to be Australia’s national cuisine - and how you make Scriptures that rely on the language of sheep and shepherds meaningful within a non-pastoralist culture.
Then: Tom Kaiser is Simon Smart’s local butcher. Perhaps unusually for a butcher, he thinks people should eat less meat. He sells meat products that many would consider to be expensive in what he calls the “Masterchef era”.
“Affluence definitely plays a big part. They can afford to have the product that they see on TV. We know for a fact that we wouldn’t be able to charge the price, nor have the same model we have in different parts of Australia. ... Ethics is obviously multi-layered. It comes to personal beliefs. It comes down to knowledge.”
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Thursday Mar 28, 2019
The Desire for Dragons
Thursday Mar 28, 2019
Thursday Mar 28, 2019
Alison Milbank on why Tolkien and Middle-Earth exercise such a hold over us.
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“It does suggest that within the real world there are portals - thin places, if you like, where we can pass to other worlds and return. And I think that’s what the best fantasy [literature] does. It gives you an understanding of this world as much richer, much deeper than we normally realise.”
When J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings came out on top of the Waterstones Books of the Century poll in 1997, Germaine Greer voiced the frustration of fantasy sceptics everywhere. “It has been my nightmare that Tolkien would turn out to be the most influential writer of the twentieth century,” she wrote. "The bad dream has materialised … The books that come in Tolkien’s train are more or less what you would expect; flight from reality is their dominating characteristic."
Fantasy: those who love it really love it … and for others, it doesn’t do a thing. In this conversation with theologian and literary scholar Alison Milbank, Life & Faith delves into Ents, elves, enchantment, escapism, the enduring appeal of Middle-Earth, and why Tolkien went everywhere by bicycle.
Milbank believes that humans have “a natural desire for the supernatural”. She explains why she loves unicorns, and why she’s not so sure fairies aren’t real. And she makes a case for the importance of imagination in reasoning, in doing science, and even in politics.
“To be human is to want to exceed what you are … For all of us, it doesn’t matter how wonderful your spouse or your lover is, they can never wholly satisfy you. It doesn’t matter how much money you have, it will never wholly satisfy you. That’s just the way we are. And the fact that we can never stay in the object isn’t saying that we shouldn’t get married, or we shouldn’t love people, or even that we shouldn’t enjoy the things of this world. It’s just saying that they can’t give us everything. There’s something in us that just wants more ... a kind of homesickness for something we’ve never had.”
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Thursday Mar 21, 2019
A Bigger Story of Us
Thursday Mar 21, 2019
Thursday Mar 21, 2019
Why are we so polarised? Tim Dixon offers not just a diagnosis, but actual solutions.
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“It’s much easier to hold very hostile prejudicial views of other people if you actually don’t know them personally.”
Tim Dixon is co-founder of More in Common, an international initiative which has published some of the world's leading research on the drivers of polarisation and social division. He worked as chief speechwriter and economic adviser to two Australian Prime Ministers. He’s helped start and grow social movement organisations around the world to protect civilians in Syria, address modern-day slavery, promote gun control in the US, and engage faith communities in social justice.
He’s concerned about how our social glue is coming unstuck - and what that might mean for the future.
“We are living in a pre-something period … The forces that are driving us apart are growing, they're intensifying. If we don’t pay serious attention to how we bring people back together and transcend these divisions, if we continue to play the kind of toxic politics that has been characteristic of the last few years, I think we’re headed in a very, very dangerous direction.”
Tim speaks with Simon Smart on a visit to Oz to give CPX’s annual Richard Johnson Lecture, “Crossing the Great Divide: Building bridges in an age of tribalism”. Both his research and his personal story mean that he’s better placed than almost anyone to make sense of our echo chambers, our battles over national identity, and the predicament of the “exhausted majority”. And he goes well beyond diagnosis, to propose actual solutions to polarisation.
“It is out of terrible catastrophe good things can come. In a sense, as a Christian, I think of that in the context of the resurrection ... there is something about the second chance, the renewal, the fact that we’re not always stuck in the story that we seem to be a part of.”
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Thursday Mar 14, 2019
Space for the Sacred
Thursday Mar 14, 2019
Thursday Mar 14, 2019
Philosopher and theologian John Milbank on left vs right, Harry Potter, and how none of us behave like we’re just atoms.
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If you’re wanting a crash course on “isms” like liberalism, secularism, and populism from anyone, it’s John Milbank.
In this wide-ranging conversation with Simon Smart, the philosopher and theologian has a way of never saying quite what you expect him to. He questions the idea that left and right are really in opposition to each other, calls the final Harry Potter book “a profound theological meditation”, and is enthusiastic about people’s longing for paganism.
What does he think Christianity might give people that’s surprising? “Pleasure,” he replies immediately. “It would make their lives far more interesting, exciting, and pleasurable - and physical, because they’re essentially alienated from their bodies if they think their bodies are just bits of matter.”
Does he think a revival of religion is on the cards? “The reason I do think religion may revive is that it is on the side of common sense … all the time people behave as if they had minds, as if they had souls, as if the good, the true, and the beautiful, the right and wrong, were real - and yet the scientific discourses which we have, or rather their scientistic reductive modes, can’t really allow the reality of any of these things.”
From politics to angels, Milbank turns his formidable intellect on some of the quirks and contradictions of our time.
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Thursday Sep 13, 2018
An Invisible Wound
Thursday Sep 13, 2018
Thursday Sep 13, 2018
It’s everywhere, and it can be crippling. But people can be freed from the grip of trauma.
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“Trauma is an overwhelming need which people really don’t see. It’s not a physical wound that people would identify and want to help you with, it’s a wound that you have on the inside because of something you have gone through.”
Elizabeth Muriuki is General-Secretary of the Bible Society in Kenya, and she has experience of trauma healing from both sides. Her organisation uses a program developed by the Trauma Healing Institute to help people suffering from trauma – and she went through the program herself after losing her daughter. Does it work? Elizabeth gives an enthusiastic yes in response to that question. It takes time, she says, but it works.
In this episode, we talk to people working on the front lines of one of the world’s greatest areas of need: the trauma that millions upon millions suffer from globally.
It’s easy to avoid the pain of others, and hard to lean into it. But the Trauma Healing Institute, established by the American Bible Society, trains people in how to sit with those who’ve experienced traumatic events, and how to help them move forward.
They work in conflict zones around the world, with refugees in the Middle East, with people who’ve experienced domestic violence in South America or gang violence in Central America, in the US prison system. Trauma happens everywhere, explains Andrew Hood, who manages the Trauma Healing Institute.
“One of the things that has been so astounding to me as I’ve worked in this program is that I’ve seen Syrian refugees transformed by this, and I’ve seen suburban Philadelphia natives transformed by this. The point is, all humans hurt; all of us grieve. And it’s rare for us, often, to have an opportunity to process that in a community setting.”
It’s not a simple process, and it’s tough work to be involved in. But both Andrew and Elizabeth insist that there’s plenty of hope alongside the pain.
“Your trauma will always be with you. The point is that it’s not the end of your story – we believe it’s a beginning of your story. You carry it with you, in a way, throughout the rest of your life, but hopefully it can be redeemed into something, if not beautiful, at least something that is a springboard for hope.”
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Thursday Aug 23, 2018
Speak Up, Show Up
Thursday Aug 23, 2018
Thursday Aug 23, 2018
A conversation about death, loss, and what you can really say and do to help grieving people.
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“Hope was with us for 199 days and then she was gone.”
Nancy Guthrie has had to live through what many dread as the worst of all experiences of death – the death of her child. And she had to go through it twice.
“I had lots of questions. There were things I thought I understood about God that this brought to the surface – maybe I didn’t understand as much as I thought I did.”
As a Christian, Nancy turned to the Bible for answers. It wasn’t easy, but she eventually found herself in a place where she could believe that “somehow, [this experience] is going to accomplish God’s loving purposes for my life, and for my family”.
Then she fell pregnant again, unexpectedly.
“It felt like there were grey clouds gathering in the distant horizon that were getting ready to sweep through my life again,” she says.
Her son was diagnosed with Zellweger Syndrome, the same rare genetic disorder that had taken the life of her daughter, Hope, prematurely. Gabriel lived for 183 days.
“You have to make a decision about whether or not this grief is going to continue to define you, to be dominant, if you’re going to keep giving it a lot of power in your life, or if you’re going to be able to find a place for it in your life.”
In this episode, Nancy shares more of her story of loss, grief, and hope – and how she’s found a way to turn her pain into something helpful for others facing similar situations. She also gives great advice on how to really help grieving people.
First, speak up: “When you speak to them about the person they love who died … you didn’t make them sad, they’re already sad.”
And show up: “You remember who is willing to stop the busyness of their life to enter into that sorrow with you.”
For Nancy, it’s her faith that has shaped the way that she has been able to grieve well, and help others grieve well.
“Faith informs loss, but it doesn’t make loss hurt less by any means. So I would say what faith instilled in me [was] this sense that this loss wasn’t random or meaningless, and it filled me with a confidence that this life is not all there is.”
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