Mercy Aiken tells Life & Faith of the joy-filled, yet painful life of Palestinian Christian, Bishara Awad. Bishara was a child in Jerusalem when his father was shot and killed during the Israeli-Arab war of 1948. The story of his life and that of his family provides a sobering portrait of life in Israel/Palestine during decades of war, violence, tension and dashed dreams for those seeking a peaceful resolution to conflict. Somehow, Bishara, a Palestinian Christian and community leader,...

Asuntha Charles has lived in some toughest places in the world. And she’s loved it.     Long    As a young woman, Asuntha Charles stubbornly defied her culture to advocate for vulnerable women and girls. That determination never left her as she dedicated her life to voiceless people in not only her native India, but places like Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Sudan and Iraq. Here she tells Life & Faith about her extraordinary life of service and care for people who needed that care most. And we...

War correspondent Janine di Giovanni has covered the near-extinction of the ancient Christian communities of the Middle East.   ---  “They’ve survived plagues, they’ve survived pillages, they’ve survived raids, they’ve survived purges – and they most recently survived ISIS.”   The Christian communities of the Middle East – in places like Iraq and Syria, Egypt and Palestine – are ancient, and over recent decades have been facing various kinds of existential threat. Janine di Giovanni’s book...

CPX writers talk about how they’re hoping to breathe new life into a very old story.   ---  Get a glimpse into the CPX writers’ room as Simon, Natasha, Justine and Max talk about what they’re writing about Easter, or how they go about working out how to write about Easter.   Natasha talks about American novelist Marilynne Robinson’s new book Reading Genesis and how Robinson’s courteous and unapologetic way of doing “public Christianity” messes with how public conversations about God usually...

We explore the spiritual needs of people in intensive care in hospital, or behind bars.  ---  “I went to see this lady and as soon as I walked in, she actually said, ‘f*** off, I don’t want to have anything to do with you people’.”  Chaplaincy in Australia is contested. If people have had a bad experience with the church or concerned that someone might be trying to manipulate them, a chaplain walking up to say hi might get that response. Not least because people can be very vulnerable if...

For decades now in the West, religion has been on the retreat. In places where, 50 years ago, going to church on a Sunday was just what you did, we’ve had generations now for whom that would be a very foreign concept.   Justin Brierley is an author and very popular podcaster. For 17 years he hosted a podcast called Unbelievable where he would bring together atheist and Christian thinkers for civil and robust discussion. He presided over conversations with some of the world’s great minds for...

Sarah Williams explains how the mother of modern feminism fell off the pages of history. --- After her death in 1906, Josephine Butler was described as one of the “few great people who have moulded the course of things”. (For the record, she was also described by peers as “the most beautiful woman in the world”.) Yet how many of us have heard of her? A bit too feminist for later Christians, a bit too Christian for later feminists, this pioneer of the movement against sex trafficking is only...

Reflections on a human experience that’s at once routine and exceptional; both very costly and very good.  ---  Life & Faith has covered many stories relating to birth over the years – incredible stories of courage and heartbreak, difficult decisions, life and death – but we’ve never done an episode on birth itself: what’s amazing about this process, what’s so hard about it, what makes it so meaningful for so many people.   This year Simon Smart is celebrating a once-every-four-years...

…of which CPX’s Justine Toh is first and foremost.  --- In the lead up to Easter, Justine is giving up not only sugar, but her ignorance about all things Lent. She speaks to Catholic theologian Matt Tan, who goes by Awkward Asian Theologian on socials, about Lent and its three-fold focus: giving up, alms-giving, and prayer. They discuss the difficulty of self-sacrifice and the way that, strangely enough, it often proves the easier option over alms-giving, which needn’t only include giving to...

20 years on from the founding of Facebook, what role do these platforms play in our lives?  ---  February 4 marked 20 years since Mark Zuckerburg launched the site that was initially known as The Facebook from his Harvard dorm room, so this seems like a good time to take stock of what social media now looks like, and what our lives look like as a result.  Whether you’re an avid user of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, TikTok, and more, or a social media sceptic, join Simon Smart, Justine Toh,...

Anglican Priest David Pileggi talks about what Christmas means in his town of Jerusalem in the midst of war.    --- Anglican priest David Pileggi has lived in Jerusalem for over 40 years. In that time he has seen a lot, but recent events in Israel and Gaza have been as shocking and disturbing as any he has encountered. He talks to Life & Faith about his life in the “Holy City” - what he loves about it and the things he weeps over. Despite all that has transpired in recent days David...

British journalist David Goodhart on the Anywhere-Somewhere divide challenging national unity abroad and at home. --- Is Australia polarised?   The country is no UK roiled by Brexit, or US torn apart by the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency in 2016. But we’ve had our own brushes with polarisation – most recently on the question of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament.  On this episode of Life & Faith, we look at the issue of national division from a sideways angle: could...

Our cultural narrative says there is no supernatural or transcendent realm. The CPX team wants to break that spell.  --- Seen & Heard is back – and this time, the team have disenchantment in their sights, or the belief that there is no more supernatural or transcendent realm to life, that science is the only verifiable path to truth, and that all things religious are debunked, once and for all.  But is this true? The books and films we’ve been reading and watching might...

A new book tells the stories of people whose encounters with New Atheism set them on the path to Christianity.   ---  “He said, I’ve been a scientist all my life and I was an atheist – quite a happy atheist, you know, I wasn’t particularly looking for other worldviews. Until I read The God Delusion in 2006. And that really shook my faith in atheism.”  It’s around 15 years ago that the so-called New Atheism – represented most prominently by the “Four Horsemen” Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris,...

This week marks 60 years since the death of CS Lewis and that seems like an appropriate moment to return to a very popular episode from a couple of years back. --- A lot of people know the date 22nd of November 1963 because that's the date that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. That dramatic event overshadowed another death that same day on the other side of the Atlantic – the death of the beloved writer and public Christian CS Lewis, best known still today for his Narnia...

Seeing war up close and surviving nonetheless leaves its mark. --- Andrew Hastie would not be the first person to join the defence force out of both a hunger for adventure and deep-seated sense of duty. After a distinguished career in the army, including being an officer in the elite Special Air Service (SAS), Hastie speaks to Life & Faith about the experience. He explains why he joined up, his gruelling entry into the SAS and his three tours of Afghanistan. Here we learn about the Afghan...

Hope feels scarce, but it’s not lost – and it’s within our power to be people of hope.    --- “I certainly have clients who are in their twenties who are saying to me, I will not have children because look at the world! So, the question is, where is the vision of hope?”  Clinical psychologist Leisa Aitken gets that hope seems in short supply right now. Daily headlines are a barrage of bad news – of wars and rumours of wars, politics in breakdown, the life support systems of the earth in...

Why have conspiracy theories gained so much traction? And are Christians more prone to believe them?   ---  “I’d like to say that it’s all intellectual, but I don’t think it is.”  The belief that behind the visible mechanisms of society, powerful forces are up to no good is hardly a new idea (or reality). But geopolitics and culture wars in recent years have thrown up plenty of material for conspiracy theorists to work with.   What’s so appealing about these theories? When do they become a...

Why might someone who’s not religious want to send their kids to a faith-based school? --- “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...

We’ve heard of burnout and PTSD but what about “moral injury”, that’s affecting soldiers and also Covid-19 health workers?   --- “Soul sick”.   That’s how some of the literature describes the effects of “moral injury” on people. Perhaps we’re more used to violence leaving a physical mark or causing psychological trauma that disrupts a person’s ability to live their everyday life.   But moral injury is a different kind of wound altogether. As defined by Andrew Sloane, theologian and Morling...

Australians are used to filling in forms that ask whether they have Aboriginal or Torres Strait heritage. But not many of us have contact with people from the farthest northern reaches of our country.   --- This week on Life & Faith we talk with Torres strait community leader and pastor Gabriel Bani. We hear about his growing up on the islands where houses were crowded but community life was very strong.   Gabriel tells us about his, and his people’s embrace of Christianity, despite the...

A detective and a scholar tackle the question: why are we all so obsessed with crime stories? --- “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...

Sixty years ago, MLK declared “I have a dream”. As Australia votes on the Voice, we grapple with racism.  --- 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...

An award-winning Australian novelist shares her experience of grief, chronic pain, great joy – and the supernatural.   ---  “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...