Life & Faith

Nothing but neurons

What do neuroscience, philosophy, and theology have to say about the mystery of human consciousness?
 
“Even if we come up with a beautiful elegant neuroscience of consciousness - which I hope we do - that will still leave the question, why are we conscious at all? Why does consciousness exist in the first place?”
 
Despite everything we know about the universe we live in, the content of our own heads remains a mystery in many ways. Does everything that matter - everything that makes you you - reside in your brain chemistry? What is the relationship between the brain and the “mind”, or even the “soul”? Is there such a thing? And if not, are we simply at the mercy of our neurons? Can we be said to have any kind of free will?
 
Dr Sharon Dirckx has been wrestling with existential questions like these since childhood, through her PhD in brain imaging at the University of Cambridge, and now as a senior tutor at OCCA The Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics. In this episode, she speaks with Simon Smart about her book Am I Just My Brain? and our quest to comprehend ourselves.

What love looks like

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.
-- 
READ:
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce 

Pandethics

From who gets an ICU bed to volunteering for a vaccine trial, ethics in the time of COVID is a complicated business.
“Sometimes we fall into the trap of thinking that life is mostly ethically neutral unless we come across some catastrophe or other, or some really difficult moral choice. But when we look more closely - and this I think is what COVID has done - we realise that our values and our beliefs about the world, and what’s important, and who’s important, are making themselves present all the time.”
Dan Fleming is the head of Ethics and Formation at St Vincent’s Health - so he’s been kept plenty busy this year. He speaks with Natasha about pandemic ethics - pandethics, if you will - including who gets prioritised when health resources are scarce, quality-adjusted life years, and what happens when a vaccine becomes available.
Natasha also speaks with Ed O’Neill, an oncology researcher at Oxford University - who also put his hand up to be one of the first guinea pigs in the world for a COVID-19 vaccine trial. Both Ed and Dan draw on a particular ethical framework for the choices they’ve had to make in this pandemic year - one that conceives of people as made in the image of God, and centres on love of neighbour.
“The neighbour to whom one is called first is the neighbour who's forgotten by everyone else. So today we might talk about priority populations, or poor and vulnerable groups. Different commentators use different language, so they might talk about the forgotten ones, or those who live on the underside … A unique feature of this framework is every person has the same value, objectively speaking. Every human person is enshrined in a special dignity. And that calls on us to think about, okay, well, in the context in which we find ourselves, whose dignity isn't being ensured? Whose dignity is not being served by our current context?”

Home Extension

Krish Kandiah tells us about the joys and challenges of caring for children in great need.
'Well, we got this call late on a Friday afternoon. And you know that the local social services are in trouble, because they're phoning us, and we've already got six kids in the house. So they say, "Well, Krish, and Miriam, we know you've already got a full house, but is there any way you can take another one?" And again, my wife's already saying yes. There's a pattern here, my wife is the yes person. And I'm like, suspicious, or worried, or nervous. So I just say, "Just tell me something about this child, so we can prepare." And they said, "We can't tell you much. All we can tell you is, he's a biter." And that freaked me out.'
In this episode of Life and Faith, we spoke to Dr Krish Kandiah, a speaker, writer, social entrepreneur, and a prolific author of 13 books and counting.  He's also the founder and director of Home for Good, a UK charity finding loving, stable homes for children in the care system and for young refugees.
Krish is tuned into the huge need for children in need of a home and speaks with positivity and vision around this formidable challenge.  Not only is he an advocate for family reunion, fostering and adoption, but he and his wife Miriam have also extended their own family through adoption and have fostered around 30 children in their home, over 14 years. 
Their life is anything but boring and Krish speaks with passion about the incalculable benefit to children of providing them with a safe, loving environment. And it’s impossible to miss the infectious joy that these children have brought into the Kandiah home.  
'I don't know of a more joyful experience than watching a child who had a really tough start in life, grow and flourish....I don't know of a greater joy than helping children have great moments in their lives knowing the trauma they've had in their past. So it's a great gift to the children, but weirdly, wonderfully, it's a great gift to you as well.'
Krish Kandiah
Home for Good
Home for Good Book

The Freedom Paradox

Jazz, haiku, marriage: do limits hem us in, or make us more free? 
“I've heard people say, ‘Oh, jazz must be easy. You can just play anything you want.’ But actually, jazz is very difficult, because you can play anything you want.”
Whoever you are, whatever your life is like, freedom is something you probably want a little (or a lot) more of. But what is it? 
“There's this paradoxical irony in which we imagine being free as being without constraint and having as many options as possible, and then that just becomes the recipe for our enslavement, our imprisonment, our addiction, and all of a sudden freedom means being enchained. There's a curious and sad paradox to it all.”
Philosopher James K. A. Smith talks about being born to run, and the grace of finding home. Jazz musician and New Testament scholar Con Campbell explains the paradox of improvisation. Writer Laurel Moffatt talks about the constraints of the haiku form, and what becomes possible creatively within them. And Christine and Greg Olliffe, in their 50th year of marriage, look back on a lifetime of sacrifice and the enrichment that has come from it.
Listen to Transit Jazz, “Just a closer walk with thee”
Read (and look at!) some of Laurel’s haiku at Make Whimsy Not War or her writing in general at laurelmoffatt.com
Check out James K. A. Smith’s book On the Road with St Augustine

Choosing My Religion

John Stackhouse’s new book Can I Believe? is for the curious, and the hesitant.
”And this sad little figure in a remote corner of the Roman Empire becomes the leader of the most popular religion in the history of the world - which means it's the most popular explanation for everything ever in human history. Now, that's just really strange. We're just used to it, but it's a pretty weird story.”
84 percent of the world’s population is affiliated with a religion - but Canadian scholar John G. Stackhouse Jr would say that 100 percent of us are religious. His latest book, Can I Believe? Christianity for the Hesitant, invites us all to consider what we believe and why - and explains how he thinks the weirdness of Christianity fits the weirdness of the world as it really is.
“If you think, for instance, of atomic and sub-atomic physics, think of certain forms of cosmology - there are all sorts of theories that I barely can even articulate, let alone understand, but I'm told by smart people that this is the best way to construe the data even though it's in many cases counter-intuitive. But they've tried the obvious explanations and they don't work as well as this really strange one. And that's what I think is the case with Christianity.”

The Cost of Compassion

Tim Costello brings a lifetime of experience to bear on the question: why is compassion so complicated?
“You won’t find anyone who actually says humans shouldn’t be compassionate. It then gets messy because we soon discover that we have different objects of compassion, priorities for compassion. It’s fascinating to me that, whether you’re on the right or left or in between, you will validate your political stand by appealing to compassion. So it is the universal benchmark - and yet, we still divide. And often divide quite bitterly.”
Tim Costello has spent decades trying to understand compassion - what it is, how it works - and also trying to live it out. His new book in CPX’s Re:CONSIDERING series is called The Cost of Compassion, and it sums up the lessons of a lifetime working with and for the vulnerable.
In this conversation, Tim tackles a few of the big questions: why is compassion so complicated? In an age of news overload, what do we do about compassion fatigue? And who is compassion for - who benefits from compassion, and who gets to show it to others?
“The misunderstanding that we often have about poverty and wealth is that people in extreme poverty are only recipients. I’d worked as a Baptist minister in St Kilda, and I’d discovered in an Aboriginal woman called Eva, who was the Mother Teresa of the streets of St Kilda - her giving away her last dollars, even though her pension cheque wouldn’t come for a week and she didn’t know how she was going to eat. And her joy - she had a Christian faith, she suffered from schizophrenia … she was a classic street woman, and she was the model of Jesus. So I actually knew this, in the joy in her life and the utter poverty by Australian standards of her life, even before I joined World Vision.” 
---
Buy The Cost of Compassion: https://www.reconsidering.com.au/ 

An Evangelical Election

81% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in 2016. Will that be the case this November?
In the second of our two episodes on the upcoming US election, we explore the statistic that 81% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election. According to a Pew Research report released in July, as many as 80% of white evangelicals indicated that they would still vote for him in 2020.
We ask what ‘evangelical’ even means, and consider the possibility that Donald Trump acts as a kind of representative - even a strongman - for evangelicals who feel increasingly out of step with the secular mainstream.
We explore how race factors into the mix as well, and questions of power and influence.
Again, we’re joined by experts from the US to weigh in on the discussion: Amy Black, Professor of Political Science at Wheaton College in Illinois; Lisa Sharon Harper, author, activist, and the founder and president of Freedom Road; Andy Crouch, author, speaker, and the former editor of Christianity Today, America’s flagship evangelical magazine. 
In this episode, we also hear from Kristin Kobes du Mez, Professor of History at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the author of Jesus and John Wayne: How white evangelicals corrupted a faith and fractured a nation.
—
Explore
Kristin Kobes du Mez’s book Jesus and John Wayne: How white evangelicals corrupted a faith and fractured a nation
Lisa Sharon Harper’s book The Very Good Gospel: How everything wrong can be made right 
Amy Black’s book Honoring God in Red or Blue: Approaching politics with humility, grace, and reason
Andy Crouch’s book Playing God: Redeeming the gift of power
Elisabeth Dias’ New York Times article ‘Christianity will have power’ 
Pew Research’s report indicating as many as 80% of white evangelicals would still vote for Donald Trump

Divided States of America

A polarised country, a politicised faith - and how both are playing out in the US election.
The bitter divides between Republicans and Democrats this US election season reflect a much bigger story. 
In this first of two episodes on the election, we explore the white evangelical embrace of the Republican Party and why Black voters - including Black Protestants - tend to vote Democrat. We also cover the way the breakdown of social trust, as well trust in institutions, makes this the most unpredictable election ever.
We talk to Amy Black, Professor of Political Science at Wheaton College, Illinois; Andy Crouch, author speaker, and former editor of Christianity Today, North America’s flagship evangelical magazine; and Lisa Sharon Harper, author, speaker, and founder and president of Freedom Road, a consultancy training churches and other organisations in racial justice.
—
Explore
Andy Crouch’s book Playing God: Redeeming the gift of power
Our full interview with David Smith, Senior Lecturer in American Politics and Foreign Policy, at the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney
Robert Putnam’s book American Grace: How religion divides and unites us 
The full audio of Tim Dixon’s 2019 Richard Johnson Lecture: Crossing the Great Divide - Building bridges in an age of tribalism. Audio of the Q&A session is also available. 

The (Olympic) Spirit is in the House

On the 20th anniversary of the Sydney Olympic Games, we look back at what made those games so special. Simon Smart and Mark Stephens ask what these kinds of events can tell us about who we are as human beings. Former Olympics Minister Bruce Baird talks us through the hair-raising bid process and the joy of seeing the whole thing come together so well. Veteran sportswriter Greg Baum outlines what he found so special about Sydney 2000. And seven-time Paralympian Liesl Tesch recalls the buzz of playing in front of packed houses cheering the home team on, and what this event did for Paralympians generally. And Simon Smart gets all nostalgic remembering his experiences going to anything he could get tickets for.