Life & Faith

Working in the White House

Michael Wear talks about faith, politics and having Barack Obama as a boss. 
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Michael Wear worked in the Obama White House for 3 ½ years in the office of Faith Based and Neighbourhood Partnerships before heading out and leading religious outreach on President Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012 and then directed religious affairs for the president’s second inaugural.
He is an expert on the place of faith in public life, and maintains a hopefulness that Christianity still has a deep well of resources to bring to bear on the pressing challenges of contemporary life--even being a unifying force. Michael is an optimist and believes the resources of Christian faith can be, not just a private belief system, but in fact a significant contributor to the common good.
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Michael’s book about this period of his life is Reclaiming Hope: Lessons Learned in the Obama White House about the Future of Faith in America.

Refuge Reimagined

The plight of the Tamil family from Biloela makes us ask: could we do refugee politics differently?
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The story of the medical evacuation of four-year-old Tharnicaa Murugappan to a Perth hospital from detention on Christmas Island has struck a nerve in the Australian community. Tharnicaa, her sister Kopika, and their parents Priya and Nades are facing deportation to Sri Lanka after Priya and Nades were found not to be genuine refugees. 
The family’s plight has shone a spotlight on Australia’s deliberately harsh policies of detaining asylum seekers. But their former community in Biloela, central Queensland, is campaigning that the family be allowed to stay in Australia. Politicians and personalities from across the political spectrum have also joined the cause. It seems that this Tamil family are helping Australians reimagine the kind of welcome the nation might offer to vulnerable people. 
This Refugee Week, we bring you an interview with Mark and Luke Glanville, two brothers who’ve written a book called Refuge Reimagined: Biblical Kinship in Global Politics. 
Mark is an Associate Professor of Pastoral Theology at Regent College in Vancouver, and pastored a church in East Vancouver that welcomed refugees to be part of a community called Kinbrace. Luke is an Associate Professor in the Department of International Relations at Australian National University.
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Explore:
Refuge Reimagined: Biblical Kinship and Global Politics
The community of Kinbrace

Kids Who Care

How do you raise kids who see the world’s problems, and believe they can do something about it?
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“I guess I'm concerned that kids are becoming depressed and overwhelmed by the big problems that they see in the world. And I think if we just leave it at that, they will grow up with a worldview that says, ‘The world's a wreck. There's nothing I can do in it. I might as well just watch Netflix.’ Whereas I think if we give kids an opportunity to respond to the problems in the world when they're young, they will develop a worldview that says, ‘Oh, there's a problem in the world. There's something I can do about that.’”
Susy Lee has a background in psychology, theology, aid and development, peace and conflict, children’s and family ministry, and … computer science. Across her various jobs and studies, she’s been preoccupied with the question: how do you make the world better? 
She’s convinced that how we parent has an awful lot to do with it. In her new book, Raising Kids Who Care: Practical conversations for exploring stuff that matters, together, Susy has built a handbook for family discussions on everything from consumerism to how to listen well, conflict resolution to porn, world poverty and climate change to finding your purpose in life. 
In this episode of Life & Faith, she explains how her own family background and experience has shaped her, and offers a model for parents and others to help kids encounter the tricky realities of life in ways that are hopeful, and might just change the world.
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Buy a copy of Raising Kids Who Care: Practical conversations for exploring stuff that matters, together https://www.amazon.com.au/Raising-Kids-Who-Care-conversations-ebook/dp/B0971FTPXR/ 

Excellent Sheep

A former Yale professor on the clever but morally clueless students pursuing an elite education. 
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In 2014, William Deresiewicz’s book Excellent Sheep: The miseducation of the American elite and the way to a meaningful life became an instant best-seller. The former Yale professor called out the way that elite American universities produced “excellent sheep”: clever, highly credentialled, and conscientious young people who were nonetheless stumped about the meaning of life. Instead, they funnelled themselves into high-paying jobs in law, finance, medicine, consulting, or tech.   
In this fascinating discussion, Deresiewicz talks about the way that words like “soul” have a gravity that non-religious language can’t replicate, why a good education is necessarily going to ask existential questions about “love and time and God and everything”, and how he annoyed Canadian psychologist and popular science writer Steven Pinker with talk about university as a time to “build your self”.
As the Australian federal government changes the pricing structure of university degrees to encourage students to pursue courses in areas of expected job growth, it’s clear that we’re also asking: what exactly is the value of an education?
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Explore:
Excellent Sheep: The miseducation of the American elite and the way to a meaningful life
(Bill’s most recent book) The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech

The Brothers Baird

Mike and Steve Baird grew up as sons of prominent Australian politician Bruce Baird. Both recently moved from corporate roles into the not-for-profit sector.
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Mike Baird had a successful career in banking before going into politics – eventually  becoming the 44th Premier of NSW. He returned  to banking after ten years in politics but recently moved to become CEO of HammondCare – a large Christian charity that provides dementia and aged care along with palliative care. Their mission – to improve the quality of life for people in need.
Mike’s younger brother Steve was also had a successful career in the corporate world, and has made a significant shift to International Justice Mission Australia - part of the largest anti-slavery organisation in the world. 
This week we hear from the brothers, Mike and Steve--what it was like growing up together, the people and experiences that have shaped them most and why they moved from the corporate world into the not-for-profit sector. What motivates them both in leading two organisations seeking to offer assistance to people in great need?
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https://www.hammond.com.au/
https://ijm.org.au/

The Poetry of Science

Think “scientific” and “creative” are opposites? Physicist Tom McLeish begs to disagree.
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“We forget, in science, that what we call the scientific method is really only the method for a tiny bit of science. It's the only bit of science that there can be a method for, which is testing out and checking our hypotheses when we've got them. The really crucial step in science is to get good ideas going in the first place, to have great new insights, to imagine whole new structures of the world, or fungus on the trees, or black holes, or whatever it might be. Now, there really is no method for having great, innovative, scientific, imaginative, creative ideas. So where do they come from?”
Tom McLeish is a physicist and author, and talks about science more enthusiastically than anyone else you’ll ever meet. His current title is Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of York - and “natural philosophy” is far from the only unusual term he likes to use when talking about science. 
His latest book is The Poetry and Music of Science: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art, and in this conversation he explains what being a scientist and being an artist have in common; why it is that experimental science and the English novel got going at about the same time; and why he thinks the “book of nature” might be written in poetry rather than prose.
And in the spirit of bringing art and science together, the American poet Mary Peelen reads two of her poems, “Chaos Theory” and “Supernova”, from her award-winning collection Quantum Heresies.
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Check out The Poetry and Music of Science by Tom McLeish: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-poetry-and-music-of-science-9780198797999
 
Read or listen to the Mary Peelen poems found in this episode at Radar Poetry, used with permission:
“Chaos Theory”: https://www.radarpoetry.com/chaos-theory
“Supernova”: https://www.radarpoetry.com/supernova
Discover more of Mary’s poems at http://marypeelen.com/

REBROADCAST: Missionary Doctor

“As a junior doctor I went to Ethiopia to work with my aunt in the desert area, and we were just wandering around the desert with camels, treating people under trees and shrubs and things in 50-degree heat … You’d have to sleep with a guard with a gun because the hyenas get quite close, so every now and then you’d get woken up with a gunshot and this hyena yelping off in the distance. And then a bit later that night a camel was bellowing just a few metres away from my head and gives birth, and I get splattered with all this amniotic fluid.”
Andrew Browning has spent more than 17 years in Africa as a missionary doctor. As a medical student, he spent time working with Rwandan refugees fleeing the genocide; as a junior doctor, he joined Catherine Hamlin at the Fistula Hospital in Ethiopia, dedicating his life to helping women who are suffering from debilitating childbirth injuries. 
In this episode of Life & Faith, Andrew explains how he could give up a lucrative, comfortable life as a doctor at home in Australia to help thousands of women halfway round the world. He explains the risks of childbirth in rural places, what a fistula is, and his hope for a future where women don’t have to face this kind of suffering. 
He also talks about the difference between being a missionary doctor or a secular healthcare worker somewhere like Africa – as well as how African and Western people respond differently to illness, suffering, and death. 
“I remember telling people in Australia they’ve got cancer, or ‘You’ve got a life-threatening condition’, and the immediate reaction was ‘No, no, you’re wrong’ or ‘Give me a second opinion; that can’t be true’, or they’re angry. Whereas if you do that in Africa it’s much more ‘Oh, okay, sure. My time is up.’ I mean they’re much more attuned to death and accepting of suffering as part of life, they see it every day … The poor in Africa, the physically poor, people say that they’re spiritually rich, and the materially rich are often spiritually poor – at least in my experience.”
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Content warning: This episode contains explicit medical details, as well as descriptions of violence, that you may find distressing and that probably aren’t appropriate for kids. 
Find out more about Andrew’s ongoing work to end obstetric fistula globally through the Barbara May Foundation. 
The book inspired by this episode, A Doctor in Africa, is published by Pan Macmillan.
This episode was first broadcast on 23 May 2019

On Thinking

In the latest book from the CPX team, Mark Stephens asks: why is it so hard to think well?
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“Pretty much, this book is a recount of all of the ways that I’ve failed at thinking. So it’s really a confession from start to finish, because we’re all susceptible to this.”
Thinking is one of the most basic and obvious things we do - but that doesn’t mean we do it well. Mark Stephens says it’s actually quite hard, and that thinking about thinking is uncomfortable … but that it’s very much worth doing. 
His brand new book The End of Thinking? is the latest release in the Re:considering series. In this conversation with Simon and Natasha, Mark helps us navigate the topic of thinking: from terms like the Dunning-Kruger effect, steelmanning, and ultracrepidarianism to why we should care about it in the first place - and what kind of person it will make you.
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Get your copy of The End of Thinking? here

Light Breaks Through

Makoto Fujimura and the healing power of art and faith
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Acclaimed artist Mako Fujimura talks to about the connection between beauty, art and faith. A particular emphasis is on the Japanese tradition of Kintsugi which repairs broken bowls, reassembling them with lacquer and then covering that in gold. The whole idea is that it takes broken things and not only restores them but makes them more beautiful than the original. Beauty out of brokenness is the idea - which has profound resonance with Fujimura’s understanding of his Christian faith and echoes his own experience in dealing with trauma and loss.
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Links:
Makoto Fujimura Art & Faith: A theology of Making.
https://www.waterfall-gallery.com/makoto-fujimura
https://makotofujimura.com/

The Jane Austen Episode

Why do Austen’s novels inspire an almost religious fervour?
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“There’s no one to touch Jane when you’re in a tight spot,” declares a character in the Kipling short story “The Janeites”, in which a group of soldiers in the trenches of World War I bond over their shared love of Austen.
Today, Austen fandom approaches levels of devotion unrivalled by almost any other author. At the same time, her six novels are often dismissed as “chick lit”.
In this episode, Simon agrees (with some reluctance) to finally read Pride and Prejudice - and is surprised by what he finds. Natasha speaks with Katrina Clifford, Dean of Academics at Robert Menzies College and a scholar of eighteenth-century literature, about why so many people over the last two centuries have been so obsessed with Austen.
From Mormon or Amish adaptations to the handful of surviving prayers we have from Jane’s pen; from Austen’s male historical mega-fans (Churchill, Tolkien) to the BBC’s famous lake scene; this conversation has something for everyone - whether you’re a diehard Janeite, or need a bit of convincing to give Austen a go.