Life & Faith

The Best Bit

People have very different ideas of what Christmas is “really about”. Life & Faith weighs the options.
---
“This is pure joy … but this is infused with truffle.”
What makes this time of year so magical for so many? 
In this final episode of Life & Faith for 2021, the team talk about the food, the gifts, the traditions, the family time … and what any of it has to do with the original story. Tim Costello joins Simon, Justine, and Natasha to tell a remarkable story of the most memorable Christmas present he ever received, and Rev Bill Crews talks about the 50+ years he’s been hosting a Christmas lunch for those who don’t have anyone to spend this time of year with. 
“Out of the sadness and the destructiveness of this world, new hope is being born every second. Every second. All you have to do is look and listen, and you’ll see it. Over and over and over again, I’ve found that.” 
 
Explore:
2021 Waitrose Christmas ad 
Exodus Foundation Christmas lunch for the needy

The Problem of Desire

Theologian Sarah Coakley interrogates our relationship to sex, food, money, the body, and God.
---
“I see desire as a central human phenomenon … We see desire in the newborn baby, for physical and psychological needs. We see desire in the dying person, even if they’ve lost the capacity for speech. We see desire in people who are very severely brain damaged or physically damaged. Desire is always there, from the moment of birth to the last gasp of our breath.”
Where do our desires come from? How do we adjudicate between competing desires? And what are our lives really about, what do we most long for?
Professor Sarah Coakley brings a keen and compassionate eye to our difficulties as a culture with sex, eating and drinking, wealth, and more. Her short but profound book The New Asceticism: Sexuality, Gender, and the Quest for God invites us into a lifelong sorting of desire that might allow us to prioritise what truly matters.
“If you join a religious community within Christianity, there is one question that's asked of you as you join and it's Quid petis, what are you seeking? What are you seeking? What is your life for? And I'm trying to get this question back into the heart of our spiritual and theological reflection, whether or not you believe in God.”
---
Explore: 
The New Asceticism: Sexuality, Gender, and the Quest for God

A nation of gamblers?

Tim Costello on the spiritual hold gambling exerts over Australian politics, culture, and identity.
---
Tim Costello knows a thing or two about how to fight social justice battles on multiple fronts simultaneously.
The ex-World Vision CEO, lawyer, Baptist preacher, spokesperson for the End Covid For All campaign, and Senior Fellow of CPX has also campaigned against gambling and the pervasiveness of pokies in our pubs and clubs for 25 years.
In October, the Victorian Royal Commission into Crown Casinos found that Crown’s illegal, unethical, and exploitative conduct made it “unfit” to operate a casino. And yet the organisation was still given two years to clean up its act.
Tim has been a strident critic of Crown since its inception. In this Life & Faith, he reflects on why and how Crown became “too big to fail”, the impact of gambling addiction on people’s lives, and the national myth Australia tells about itself – that it’s a nation of gamblers.
---
Explore:
Tim’s article in The Saturday Paper
Tim’s July 2021 op-ed in The Sydney Morning Herald
---
Life & Faith Survey: We love making this podcast and would value your thoughts about what we do and how we could do it better. Please consider taking 5 minutes to do this short survey – https://bit.ly/3082yW9. Thanks.

Seen & Heard - The Sequel

We talk Ted Lasso, Sally Rooney’s latest novel, and get sentimental about our stuff with Unpacking.
--- 
Simon, Natasha, and Justine download on Apple TV’s Ted Lasso, celebrating the infectious kindness of its hero, the power of pastoral care in general, and the ways the hit show brightened the days of many Australian viewers in lockdown this year.
Justine introduces the team to the surprisingly emotional experience of playing Unpacking, an award-winning video game in which you put away your character’s belongings and, in the process, reflect on how our material possessions connect us to immaterial realities like memory and emotions. 
Lastly, what happens when the twenty-something characters populating Sally Rooney’s fiction turn 30? Natasha meditates on their angst, disappointments, relationships, and conflicted spiritual longings in Rooney’s latest book Beautiful World, Where Are You.
---
Explore:
Seen & Heard: Simon, Natasha, and Justine talk about Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen’s podcast Renegades: Born in the USA, Patricia Lockwood’s memoir Priest Daddy, and the latest TV adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand
Millennial Malaise: Life & Faith interview with Guardian journalist Bridie Jabour, author of Trivial Grievances: On the myths, miseries, and contradictions of your 30s
Miroslav Volf’s CPX lecture Pleasure, Meaning and the Death of God
Sandra Newman’s article: "Every house is a haunted house"
---
Life & Faith Survey: We love making this podcast and would value your thoughts about what we do and how we could do it better. Please consider taking 5 minutes to do this short survey – https://bit.ly/3082yW9. Thanks.

Can you see me?: Christine Caine’s Fight Against Modern Slavery.

Christine Caine explores how her own challenges ignited a passion for justice for the voiceless and exploited.
------
Author, speaker, and advocate Christine Cain tells Life & Faith about her personal journey that led her to co-found anti-slavery organisation--A21. She explains her shock when she discovered not only the scale of human trafficking in the world today, but that it existed at all.
Christine’s personal story is inextricably linked to the reason she took this challenge on, and her faith explains why she thinks audacious goals are achievable in the fight to end slavery today.
“We have a statement Um at A:21, it says let's abolish slavery everywhere forever. Some people roll their eyes, but I'm like, ‘This is not rocket science, there's 7.8 billion people and 40 million slaves do the math!’ If we awaken enough people to this and then we are prepared to change our lives a little bit, I think we can actually get this job done.”
“I looked and I went in that moment from looking at someone else's missing child to seeing what could have been my own daughter.”
------
https://www.a21.org/
https://christinecaine.com/content/books/gk14sg
---
Life & Faith Survey: We love making this podcast and would value your thoughts about what we do and how we could do it better. Please consider taking 5 minutes to do this short survey – https://bit.ly/3082yW9. Thanks.

The loneliness epidemic

Clinical psychologist Jonathan Andrews explains how, in the right circumstances, relationships can heal our broken hearts, and salve our growing loneliness. 
------
Jonathan Andrews’ book The Reconnected Heart: How Relationships Can Help Us Heal is born out of his experience as a clinical psychologist where he has witnessed the powerful healing potential in connection with ourselves, other people and with God. 
Andrews believes that there are significant benefits from cultivating healthy relationships that can help us overcome even significant trauma and loss.
“And this is a thing I think to remember about loneliness, loneliness isn't just about the quantity of connection, it's about the quality of connection. To put it succinctly would say something like it's about the lack of understanding. So you can be lonely in a crowd, you can be lonely at a party. So there's lots of people around, but really if you want to overcome loneliness, you have to be properly understood.”
“... we underestimate the positive impact that we can bring to other people's lives. And we also … w entertain this idea that I'm the only one who's suffering like this and that's simply not true. One in four Australians are suffering from significant amounts of loneliness. So the lonely people aren't alone, Lonely people are experiencing things that many, many Australians are experiencing.”
------
The Reconnected Heart: How Relationships Can Help Us Heal by Jonathan Andrews
------
Life & Faith Survey: We love making this podcast and would value your thoughts about what we do and how we could do it better. Please consider taking 5 minutes to do this short survey - https://bit.ly/3082yW9. Thanks.

Alice Pung’s One Hundred Days

The award-winning novelist talks about navigating cultural diversity, representation, and Buddhism. 
------
“Books don’t change people. I think people change people.”
Alice Pung’s novels are beloved by readers, but she has a bone to pick with those who mostly encounter people with various backgrounds through fiction. “Why don’t you have any Asian friends or black friends or poor friends or friends from the other side of the river in the western suburbs? Why do you need me to open up your eyes?”
“My biggest readers are woke people and I would think it would be a wonderful thing if they brought less of my books. And you know, catch the bus across to Footscray and play basketball with some of the kids atnd the commission flats or something. It’s my biggest gripe that some people think you can become a good person just by reading books,” she said.
Pung’s latest novel One Hundred Days tells the story of Karuna, a half Chinese-Filipino, half white-Australian teenager. After she falls pregnant, a battle of wills ensues between Karuna and her mother, who confines Karuna to their apartment to protect her. 
The novel depicts a claustrophobic and controlling relationship between mother and daughter and, as with much of Pung’s work, offers a glimpse into the challenges of living between cultures in modern Australia.
Pung also opens up about up her experience of Buddhism, and the challenge of depicting the lived religious experience of her characters without reinforcing crude stereotypes of race or religion.
If nothing else, this conversation will invite you to consider what life looks like from the perspective of people you may never meet, but with whom you share multicultural Australia.
------
Explore:
One Hundred Days by Alice Pung

Forestmaker

Tony Rinaudo has uncovered some surprising sources of hope for a warming planet.
------
“In that moment, for me, everything changed. I wasn't fighting the Sahara desert … Everything that I needed was literally at my feet. And the real battle was, if people had reduced the environment to this point – it's on its knees, it’s struggling to provide for anybody, nature or humankind – if it was people’s beliefs and actions about trees and nature that destroyed it, then that’s where the battle was. And if I can convince people to work with nature instead of destroying it, then the rest would be relatively easy. So that was the big turning point, the big revelation.”
In a world of rising temperatures, land degradation, and biodiversity loss, where can we find hope for the earth?
Tony Rinaudo is Principal Climate Action Adviser for World Vision, and he has spent more than four decades on reforestation – initially as a missionary and agronomist in desertified Niger, and since then in more and more countries around the world. The practice he has helped spread is called FMNR: Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration. According to one observer who’s worked closely with him, “It is no exaggeration to say that Tony Rinaudo may save the planet.”
Climate anxiety is on the rise for young people in particular. In this episode, Tony tells his own story of wanting to make a difference, explains what FMNR is and does, describes a hidden underground forest, and shares his sources of hope for the future.
“I like to encourage them and say it’s never too late. Do what you can within your means, within your circle of influence. And then, when you get to that level, you’ll always be able to see further and do more. And what’s more, what’s amazing is when you take a step in the right direction, others will come to your aid, others will join you.”

Dangerous Places

Benjamin Gilmour reflects on 26 years as a paramedic, a poet, and a filmmaker - including in Afghanistan.
------
Benjamin Gilmour’s book The Gap recounts a very intense summer working as a paramedic out of Bondi Ambulance station in Sydney. He comes face to face with violence, drugs, domestic disputes, brawls, heart attacks, emergency births. There’s even a kidnapping!
 
The trauma, death and distress inevitably take their toll on Benjamin and his colleagues. The gallows humour can only take you so far.
 
Benjamin describes his love for the job, his patients, and his deep empathy for humans and their fallibility. 
 
That same empathy has taken him to far away places of danger, conflict and also searing beauty, where Ben’s compassionate eye as a poet and filmmaker have provided him with extraordinary stories and experiences.
His film Jirga, filmed in Afghanistan, explores the complexities of war, guilt and the pursuit of forgiveness. The film reflects Benjamin’s own spiritual journey and search for the best of humanity in all its messiness and glory.

REBROADCAST: Portrait of an Editor

Scott Stephens, editor of ABC’s Religion & Ethics website, shares his own fascinating backstory.
------
As editor of the ABC’s Religion & Ethics website, Scott Stephens spends his days trawling through the best of contemporary theological and ethical thinking. But the story of his life proves just as intriguing as the material he daily immerses himself in.
In this episode of Life & Faith, Scott talks about being the son of a staunchly Republican father and a peacenik mother who instilled in him a love of art and literature, and an upbringing that set Scott on his current course in life.
------
Scott will be delivering the 2021 Richard Johnson Lecture. Tickets for this livestreamed event are available here: https://bit.ly/3lqkNwg
 
ABC’s Religion & Ethics website: www.abc.net.au/religion