Life & Faith

REBROADCAST: Murder Most Popular

A detective and a scholar tackle the question: why are we all so obsessed with crime stories?
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“When I was a child, not everything was a detective story. Now it is, on television. And it’s almost as if we all want to know, we want to know the big question: who did it??” 
Judging by the perennial popularity of detective novels and crime shows, and the current wave of true crime podcasts, it’s not a stretch to call our culture murder-obsessed. Why are these stories so fascinating to us? Is there something wrong with us?
It’s a topic writers have long been drawn to, in essays like George Orwell’s “Decline of the English Murder” and W. H. Auden’s “The Guilty Vicarage”. In this episode of Life & Faith, Natasha Moore speaks with literary scholar and theologian Alison Milbank about the hold these stories have over us – and also Jim Warner Wallace, who’s been dealing with the real thing for decades in his work as a cold case detective. 
“When you knock on the door of the neighbour of a serial killer, they’re likely to say, ‘Oh I’m so glad you’re taking that guy to jail, that guy is crazy – I mean it smells bad over there, there’s all kinds of weird noises, he’s always digging holes in his backyard’ … When you think of my kinds of cases, you knock on the neighbour’s door and tell them ‘I’m taking your neighbour to jail for this case from 30 years ago’, they’ll generally say, ‘No, I’ve known that guy for 30 years, he’s a great guy. No way could he have done that.’”
From our deepest convictions about human nature to how you can tell if a suspect might be lying, this episode delves into the appeal of the murder mystery, and also unfolds the surprising story of how Jim came to apply his particular skill-set to the truth claims of the Christian faith. 
“All of my cases, I call these ‘death by a thousand paper cuts’ – cases where you’ve got 80 pieces of evidence that point to this suspect. Any one of those pieces of evidence I’m not sure I would want to go to trial with … but when you have all 80 and they point to the same reasonable inference, this is now heavy and weighty. And that’s where I was with the Gospels.” 
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Reading mentions:
George Orwell, “Decline of the English Murder”
W. H. Auden, “The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the detective story, by an addict”
Jim Warner Wallace, Cold-Case Christianity (10th Anniversary Edition)
And check out the rest of Jim’s work at https://coldcasechristianity.com/

Martin Luther King Jr and race in Australia

Sixty years ago, MLK declared “I have a dream”. As Australia votes on the Voice, we grapple with racism. 
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It’s been 60 years since Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr. ascended the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., declaring that “one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers – I have a dream today.” 
More than half a century on from King’s dream, where are we in Australia on the vexed question of race relations?  
In this episode of Life & Faith, we speak to fellow CPXer Max Jeganathan, who’s recently written about the Voice and his own experience of racism in Australia – according to him, the “least racist” country he’s ever lived in.  
Max was born into a Sri Lankan Tamil family with close personal experience of the Black July riots of 1983, a government-sanctioned program of racial discrimination against minority Tamils. His family wound up in Australia as humanitarian refugees.  
While Max is very positive about growing up in Australia, he’s still experienced racism. Which provides a glimpse, perhaps, of the racial discrimination experienced by Aboriginal Australians on an ongoing basis. 
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Explore 
Max’s article on how the Voice is a question of love and moral imagination 
Max’s article on racism in light of the 60th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s speech 
The Martin Luther King Jr. segment from For the love of God: How the church is better and worse than you ever imagined.  

Spiritual Explorer: A Conversation with Heather Rose

An award-winning Australian novelist shares her experience of grief, chronic pain, great joy – and the supernatural.  
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“As I’ve travelled the world and talked to endless strangers and asked them, did they ever have an experience they couldn’t explain? … I would have asked that question many, many hundreds of times. There’s been nobody who said no.” 
49% of Australians say they never have a spiritual conversation. We think of ourselves as a very secular people – yet behind labels like “no religion” and “spiritual but not religious” lies a rich and varied (and sometimes strange) story.  
Heather Rose is the award-winning author of Museum of Modern Love and Bruny – and now, the spiritual memoir she says she didn’t mean to write, Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here. 
Heather’s life has been punctuated by encounters with the supernatural and intense spiritual experiences. In this conversation, she talks about nearly becoming a Buddhist nun, participating in a Native American Sun Dance, the beauty of her father’s Christian faith, and her wrestle with the idea that perhaps nothing bad does ever happen here.

Home Truths: Rob Stokes and the battle to end homelessness

Rob Stokes reflects on the joys and challenges of his political career, as well as his latest challenge – solving homelessness.  
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Simon Smart speaks with ex-politician Rob Stokes about public service and the most satisfying aspects of his life in politics. Stokes gives an honest account of not only the best aspects of being able to “get things done” but also the frustrations of compromise, the exhausting demands and the life of a politician. Ultimately Stokes encourages would-be political operatives to dive in with an attitude of service and sacrifice and urges us all to be more engaged in the political process.  
His latest project aims to tackle homelessness, a challenge Stokes is remarkably upbeat and energised about.   
 
Explore: 
Faith Housing Alliance  

For Whom the Bell Tolls: death, dying and the afterlife

This week we take on a topic most of us want to avoid and find it surprisingly life-giving.  
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Sydney Morning Herald opinion editor Chris Harrison faced death as a teenager and lived to tell the tale. Listeners will find his account of returning to the sports field where, after being hit with cricket ball, he was clinically dead for two minutes, both moving and confronting.  
This week we hear from Chris about that experience as well as from Marianne Rozario, the co-author of a report that was conducted in the UK into attitudes to death and dying. Rozario explains the way our feelings about death, dying and the memorialisation of those who have passed, have changed (and how they have stayed the same), and what all this suggests about us as human beings.  
Justine and Simon are left to consider the way we process death and the loss of those we love and where we might find hope in the face of the harsh reality that is true of every life.  
Explore: 
Chris Harrison: “"I was clinically dead for 2 minutes. This is what I saw, Sydney Morning Herald (January 29, 2022)
Theos Think Tank report: Ashes to Ashes: Beliefs, Trends, and Practices in Dying, Death, and the Afterlife 
 

Every Version of You with Grace Chan

This highly acclaimed, speculative novel tackles the mind-body problem, and the mystery of consciousness. 
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If given the choice, would you agree to be uploaded to an entirely digital existence: freed from death, pain, and suffering – because freed from the body? Or would you remain human on a dying planet? 
That’s the thought experiment behind Grace Chan’s speculative novel Every Version of You, a book that fleshes out our anxieties and fears – and also, desires – about technology and how it affects what it means to be human. 
In Chan’s vision of the future, Australia in the 2080s has been ravaged by climate change. With the physical world in breakdown, people spend more and more time in Gaia, a digital paradise. But then the option to be uploaded to Gaia – indefinitely – becomes a reality. What will Chan’s characters choose – and what would you?  
In this episode of Life & Faith, Justine Toh interviews Grace Chan about her novel, the winner of the University of Sydney People’s Choice Award at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards 2023.  
Hear Grace talk about how her book has gotten book clubs buzzing and how her training as a psychiatrist influenced the novel’s take on identity and the self. Then ask yourself: would an uploaded humanity remain human? 
Explore 
Seen & Heard: Mrs Davis and other tech misadventures, featuring Grace Chan’s Every Version of You. 
Would you want to be uploaded to a digital heaven? Justine Toh’s article for CPX 
Grace Chan on Twitter 

Peace Be Upon You

Scholar and peacemaker Riad Kassis, from the perspective of a region in crisis, calls all of us to hope and generosity.  
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“We talk about peace in our region; we have a greeting that says, peace be upon you, and we respond, and be upon you as well. But it is just a greeting. We would like to see it in practice.”  
When Riad Kassis was a teenager, he and his family left their home in Lebanon during a civil war and took refuge next door, in Syria. These days, living back in Lebanon not far from the Syrian border, the situation is reversed: around 2 million refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war are now living in Lebanon, a country with a total population of 5 million.  
This is just one of the crises faced by Lebanese people: economic collapse, the wake of the terrible explosion in Beirut in 2020, the pandemic of course, and the recent earthquake in the region have caused continual turbulence and hardship.  
This week on Life & Faith, Dr Kassis describes what life is like in the midst of continual crisis, and what helps him to hope for more peaceful days. An Old Testament scholar, he also discusses feelings of frustration with God, and shares some of his wife Izdihar’s work with Syrian refugees, especially young women. And he has a message of encouragement for Australians specifically.

The Invisible Heart: Anne Manne and the Care Economy

How the “invisible hand” of the market relies on the critical – and undervalued – work of care.  
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“We need to put care at the centre of the Australian economy.” 
Before Sam Mostyn headed up the Women’s Economic Equality Taskforce, advising the Federal Government on ways to improve women’s economic equality, she gave a blistering address to the National Press Club about the long-ignored contribution of care – and the women who were mostly expected to do it – to national wellbeing.  
Mostyn gave that address in late 2021 after months of lockdown, during which women did disproportionately more housework and childcare than men. Beyond individual households, feminised care industries full of “essential workers” – nurses, teachers, childcare workers, and aged care staff – also shouldered an extra load caring for vulnerable people through the pandemic.  
Both kinds of work make up the care economy, or the paid and unpaid work of keeping people alive and well. It’s powered by women, and it’s typically taken for granted. 
This episode of Life & Faith is timed to coincide with the 300th anniversary of the birth of Adam Smith, the Scottish philosopher, economist, and “father” of capitalism. Smith held that the “invisible hand” – a metaphor for a hands-off approach to buying and selling in the marketplace – would produce beneficial outcomes for all. 
Not so fast, say care feminists. They argue that the “invisible hand” can do nothing without the “invisible heart”: the compassion and love that drives the care economy, and on which the market economy is entirely reliant, but which isn’t accounted for in measures of GDP.  
In this episode, we sample two stories of care, highlighting its invisibility and yet the essential role it plays in people’s flourishing.  
We speak to Andie Thorpe, a doctoral student who became her mother’s official carer when she was 10 years old. Andie was also named NSW Young Carer of the Year in 2014.  
We also interview the journalist and social critic Anne Manne, who has been speaking and writing about the care economy long before it hit the mainstream.  
Note: we had a technical difficulty in the Anne Manne interview that makes Justine periodically sound like a robot! Apologies for that. 
  
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Explore 
Anne Manne’s Quarterly Essay: Love and Money – The Family and the Free Market 
Anne Manne’s book Motherhood: How should we care for our families? 
Anne Manne in The Monthly, writing about making women’s unpaid work count 
Nancy Folbre’s book The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values 
SBS profile on Andie Thorpe 
Simon Smart writing in The Sydney Morning Herald about Robert Putnam’s work on social capital and faith communities 

Seen & Heard: Mrs Davis and other tech misadventures

The CPX team freaks out about AI, explores stories of “efficiency” run amok, and probes our tech utopias.   
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The apocalypse will be ... boring. 
Or so says Charlie Warzel, tech journalist for The Atlantic. He means that AI won’t put you out of a job or take over the world, so much as overstuff your inbox and give you more mind-numbing tasks to complete. 
Other people in the know about AI are less optimistic. Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather” of AI who resigned from Google in May, Sam Altman, the CEO of the company behind ChatGPT, and others have sounded the alarm: AI is progressing too quickly, no one knows exactly how it works, and without careful regulation it will upend life as we know it.  
There are a lot of unknowns where technology is concerned. One thing we do know, though, is it makes for great TV, and stories and books. 
In this edition of Seen & Heard, the CPX team debriefs on what they’ve been watching and reading.  
Natasha takes us through the twists and turns of Amazon Prime’s Mrs Davis, a “bonkers” show about a nun facing off against Mrs Davis, the all-knowing algorithm against whom she has a grudge.  
Simon looks at the way George Saunders’ short story “Escape from Spiderhead” (and the Spiderhead film based on it) explores how “the greater good” is used to justify all kinds of evils.  
Justine looks closer at the digital utopia on offer in Grace Chan’s speculative novel Every Version of You, and finds that its promise of agelessness, no death, no suffering, and no body is basically heaven without God.  
 
Explore: 
ABC article on Replika 
Every Version of You by Grace Chan 
Escape From Spiderhead by George Saunders (via The New Yorker) 
Mrs Davis trailer 
Her and a Disembodied Future by Mark Stephens 
Andy Crouch’s Richard Johnson Lecture on why technology keeps disappointing us and Q&A 
Charlie Warzel: Here’s how AI will come for your job 

Making space: community and creation care

Jo Swinney grew up in family committed to environmental care and community. Her parents’ efforts to revitalise a small piece of land in Portugal eventually spawned an international family of organisations committed to conservation of the natural environment.         
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In this wide-ranging discussion, Jo Swinney talks to Simon Smart about growing up in a commune-type existence in Portugal where her English parents were committed to conservation and fostering biodiversity. And also community. 
Jo left for boarding school in the UK when she was 13 and live a nomadic existence for many years before settling into marriage and family in England. The smells and sounds of her childhood in Portugal never left her and nor did her commitment to hospitality and creation care.  
This is a conversation of touching honesty about family, friendship and the things that sustain us when tragedy strikes. 
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Explore:
A Rocha
Books by Jo Swinney
A Place at The Table: Faith, hope and hospitality
Home: The quest to belong