Life & Faith

The Book of the People: Part 1

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.” 

Saging with a Hebrew school dropout

New York Rabbi Bob Kaplan on how to share a society with people you radically disagree with.
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“Being a rabbi, I always kid around that I am a Hebrew school dropout. The rabbi and I only agreed upon one thing in Hebrew school: he didn't want me there and I didn't want to be there.”
Bob Kaplan never expected to become a rabbi. In this episode of Life & Faith, he tells Simon and Natasha about growing up non-kosher in Brooklyn, how he once managed a New England ashram, and what he’s learned over decades of community building about living with the “other”. 
Rabbi Bob has worked with police and educators, he’s spoken at the White House, been a grief counsellor after 9/11, and worked on mediation and conflict resolution from Belfast to Jerusalem. He has a highly developed sense of our proficiency as humans in the art of hating, and a lot of hope when it comes to the possibility of building a “shared society”. 
“Respect is something that needs to be earned; dignity is God-given. And that means that when I talk to you, I may disagree with your faith, I may disagree with your notion of life, but if I come off and tell you that right away and just say ‘you're a dumb idiot for believing that’, what I've done is I've closed down the ability to communicate with you. … How do you get to that place of understanding that you're encountering the divine when you're encountering another human being?” 

Fear is a useless thing

Valerie Browning on the choices that led to her life among the Afar nomads of the Ethiopian desert.
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“Why do you protect yourself? Life without risk is not life, it is simply not life.”
Valerie Browning is a nurse and midwife who has spent the last 30 years among the Afar people of Ethiopia. She has endured civil war and snakebite, extreme heat and malaria, and nearly died in childbirth. She daily takes on the hardships confronting her people: famine, cholera, infant mortality, illiteracy, climate change, and the real causes of poverty. 
It’s an unexpected path for someone who was born in England and grew up in country NSW. In this interview, Valerie explains what’s wonderful about Afar life, explains how she keeps going in the face of overwhelming need, and puts us all on the hook for the choices we make in our affluent Western context.
“I see in the life of the Afar almost the life of the four Gospels. Where was Christ? Was he sitting in a very comfortable chair? Did he iron his clothes every day? Did he wear perfume? I don't think so. I really don't think so. Because he was with those who were the most neglected in the society. He seemed to be having a good time actually … It's up to all of us, in our own responsibility, in our own belief, to find out whether we're on the right path or not.”
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You can learn more about Valerie’s work and support it here: www.barbaramayfoundation.com 
Listen to our interview with Valerie’s nephew Andrew Browning here: https://www.publicchristianity.org/missionary-doctor/ 
Photo credit: Joni Kabana. 

A Lot with a Little: Part II

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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A Lot with a Little: Part I

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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He had a dream

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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9 to 5

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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The “Christian" Classroom

Why might someone who’s not religious want to send their kids to a faith-based school? 
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“Teachers are one of the few groups of people in society who can tell other people what to do in their discretionary time and - by and large - they obey.” 
Education is among our core activities as a society - so it’s unsurprising that it can be a battleground for all sorts of ideas. 
David I. Smith is Professor of Education at Calvin University, and he has spent decades thinking about how education really forms people. He says that there’s no such thing as a “vanilla” or “neutral” education - and that even a maths or a French textbook will imply a whole way of seeing the world and other people. 
“We spent a lot of time learning how to say in French and German, ‘This is my name. This is my favourite food. I like this music. I don’t like biology. This is what I did last weekend. I would like two train tickets to Hamburg. I would like the steak and fries. I would like a hotel room for two nights.’
So the implicit message of the textbooks was that the reason why we learn other people’s languages is so that we can obtain the goods and services that we deserve and so that we can tell people about ourselves … It’s not really imagining us as people who listen to other people’s stories or as people who care about the members of the culture we’re visiting who don’t work in hotels, or as people who might want to talk about the meaning of life and not just the price of a hamburger.” 
Given that about a third of Australian schools are religious, and that faith-based education is the subject of nervousness on both the left and right of politics these days, it’s worth asking: why do parents who aren’t religious want to send their kids to Christian schools? What’s the content of a “Christian” education? And what happens when religious schools get it wrong? 
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Rebroadcast: Just Women

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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Glorious Ruins

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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