Life & Faith

Possibilities and dangers from corona chaos. Will we emerge from the Corona crisis with stronger bonds and more united communities? What will it take to preserve solidarity and the re-ordering of our priorities? In this episode of Life & Faith Simon Smart checks in with Tim Costello as to how he is surviving ISO. Simon and Tim then talk to Tim Dixon, enduring Covid19 lockdown in London. Tim is the co-founder of More in Common, and leads a team seeking to build civic bonds and strengthen democracies by doing research and telling the stories of what we share, as opposed to what divides us. Tim sees some fascinating possibilities in what might emerge from our experience of the virus. Observing renewed community solidarity both online and from local initiatives, as well as a concern for the most vulnerable, he wonders if we can find ways to maintain this once the crisis has passed. The conversation also considers the possibility that when faced with mortality and an inability to control our lives, more people might turn to spiritual answers to life’s deepest questions. Growth in online church “attendance” may provide a clue.   https://www.moreincommon.com/

We might be “all in this together” but what does the Covid19 crisis mean for those on the margins of society? In this Life & Faith Simon Smart and Tim Costello discuss the impact of the Coronavirus on individuals and communities. Will it change our priorities and what will be the lasting impact? Tim considers the very real and detrimental effect of the economic downturn on the charity sector. And Simon and Tim talk to Neil Smith from Planet Shakers church in Melbourne about their “Empower” initiative that provides food and necessities for people in need and in a manner that gives them dignity and agency. Neil explains how demand for their services has spiked and how they’ve welcomed some unexpected clients in recent days. Tim's article in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/30/we-need-to-be-physically-distant-but-we-need-to-share-our-collective-pain Planetshakers Empower: https://www.empoweraustralia.com.au/

This Easter, we encounter incredible stories of forgiveness in the face of unimaginable suffering. Early in 2020, Australians everywhere were shaken by the awful news of the tragic death of four children - three siblings and one cousin - in Western Sydney, mown down by an alleged drunk driver while on their way to buy ice cream one summer evening.  But what struck everyone was the response of the parents of three of the children, Daniel and Leila Abdallah. Though devastated, Leila said that she wanted to forgive the driver. She refused to hate him. “That’s not who we are,” she said. That instinct to forgive is not quick or easy for most of us. In this episode of Life & Faith, we hear from Kylie Beach, a journalist from Christian newspaper Eternity, who reported on a prayer vigil for the Abdallah children. While there, she met Daniel and Leila, and was struck with their ability to comfort others, even in the midst of their heartbreak. We also meet Anba Angaelos, the Coptic Orthodox Archbishop of London. He shares the terrible story of the 21 men - 20 of them Egyptian Coptic Christians - kidnapped and then beheaded by ISIL on a Libyan beach in 2015. The two stories of tragedy could hardly be more different. But they share - along with the Easter story - an impulse to forgiveness in the midst of terrible suffering.  — Read: Kylie Beach’s article in Eternity Martin Mosebach’s book The 21: A journey into the land of Coptic martyrs  

A story of world records, and navigating a neurotypical world of work. “I used to think why are we so similar and yet our lives have turned out quite differently? I thought that she was just introverted at the time. Now, looking back, I can see how some of her autistic challenges were not being properly addressed, not being properly understood … I could see a missed opportunity for people like her, that are being left out of the workplace but have amazing strengths that could be deployed with a bit of appropriate structure around them.” In this episode of Life & Faith, Simon Smart speaks to Mike Tozer, founder and CEO of Xceptional. This unique company began by offering employment for people with autism, but then developed into a recruitment and placement service, finding roles for people with autism in companies that really need the skills they can provide.  Mike is also a world record-holder, although for quite an unusual record - running a half-marathon in a business suit! And his motivation to raise awareness this way was very personal: both his sister and his son have autism.  Creativity in the face of challenge. The ability to turn difficult situations to excellent outcomes. Mike’s story is one for all of us in the strange days we’re living in. An interesting side-note: one of Mike’s employees, Tim, was recently featured in the ABC series Employable Me. Take a look via the link below.  --- Xceptional:Xceptional Employable Me: ABC Employable Me and Northern Pictures Photo Cred: Drew Grigg,  YetAnotherIdea

Memoir, biography, and even confession: when we tell our stories, just who do we hope is listening? “We feel this impulsion to tell our story, to share our story, to bear witness to the mystery that is us, and to give it away. And that itself is a deeply risky venture, because it makes us so vulnerable.” What are we doing when we tell the stories of our lives?  In this Life & Faith, Simon Smart and Justine Toh explore memoir, biography, and the desire to explain ourselves to others.  Simon also talks to James K. A. Smith, Professor of Philosophy at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the author of On the road with St Augustine: A real world spirituality for restless hearts. Yes, Augustine. According to Smith, regardless of what you think about God, you tread in the footsteps of the fourth-century bishop whenever you tell the story of your life. Augustine’s Confessions - part spiritual autobiography, part memoir, part prayer to God - looms over the genre of memoir today. -- Read: James K. A. Smith’s On the road with St Augustine: A real world spirituality for restless hearts  Anna McGahan’s Metanoia: A memoir of a body, born again Lisa Taddeo’s Three women and Justine Toh’s article on ABC Religion & Ethics C.S. Lewis’ Till we have faces Brian Rosner’s Known by God: A biblical theology of personal identity, and revisit our Life & Faith interview about the book Watch:The Good Place on Netflix, or sample the episode we discuss in this episode here

It takes a village to raise not just a child, but also the teen parent of one. Bernadette Black fell pregnant at 16. Her dad had a public meltdown, but Bernadette decided to have the baby. One day, she flicked through a baby name book and looked up the meaning of her own name. Bernadette, it turned out, meant ‘brave as a bear’. “And I thought, “You know what? That’s just what I have to be. Somehow I have to be brave as a bear,” Bernadette said, even as she experienced plenty of stigma throughout her pregnancy and the early years of Damian, her baby boy. Twenty-six years later, Bernadette heads up the Brave Foundation, which aims to build a village of support around expectant and parenting teens, connecting them with support services as well as educational and employment opportunities. In 2019, Brave was awarded $4.4 million to roll out a trial connecting with and mentoring almost 400 teen mums around Australia. Brave partners with teen parents to help them achieve their goals, providing to them exactly the kind of support Bernadette could not access herself. For Bernadette, the support of one of her teachers was instrumental. “What Mr Schiele did was he looked at who I was, not at the situation that was happening. And that meant so much to me because actually that didn’t change from his perspective. He said, ‘The journey is going to be different now, but the destination can stay the same’,” she said. “I wouldn’t be sitting here having this conversation today, if Mr Schiele didn’t say those words. That gave me great strength.” — Donate to the Brave Foundation Buy Brave Little Bear by Bernadette Black Find out more about Anglican Deaconess Ministries

A poet tells the story of his faith unravelling - and being woven together again.  “One of my favourite sayings in the world, ’The fish in the bowl doesn’t know that it’s wet’ - that helped me to look back upon the fishbowl that I’d been swimming in.”  Performance poet Joel McKerrow’s recently published book Woven is not a book of cookie-cutter spirituality. It’s not a book of answers, or programmable spiritual growth. It’s a question, an invitation, a beckoning toward movement.  In this refreshingly honest conversation with Joel, he looks back on the lost faith of his childhood and the grief associated with that loss - and also recounts how he regained his faith, this time a richer and more holistic, robust version. It’s a conversation about restoration and rebuilding of broken things, and how the rebuilt thing is stronger and able to weather the storms of life.  Check out Joel's book Woven: A Faith For the Dissatisfied

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 now being remembered. Sarah Williams is an historian at Regent College and a research associate at St Benet’s Hall, Oxford. And over the last few years, she has gotten to know Josephine Butler well – she would even go so far as to call her a friend. When Natasha Moore asked what she finds so remarkable about Butler, Sarah speaks first about her persistence – the sixteen years she spent working to overturn one law that unjustly discriminated against women. “I don't think that we lack vision in our culture, but we definitely lack stamina … I think she did it by recognising that she couldn’t do it. Does that sound strange?” For International Women’s Day this year, meet the woman who’s been called the mother of modern feminism – and join an ongoing conversation our culture is having about power, justice, gender, and what it means to “change the world”. “We might imagine that the real centres of power are where powerful people change culture through influencing spheres of culture – media, politics, the law, and so on … And yet what's extraordinary about somebody like Josephine Butler or Mahatma Gandhi or any other of the great social reformers that we can think of in history, is that they somehow manage to see that really the margins matter a lot. And that what goes on at the centre, if it fails to understand what's going on at the margins, does so at its peril.” --- Sarah Williams was in Sydney for the annual ADM School of Theology, Culture & Public Engagement.

How many people can say they work undercover to bring justice to some of the world’s most vulnerable people? --- “I thought I was prepared for this work, but I really wasn’t. My three years in India ... hardest three years of my life, of all the things I've done, including being in the Marines. But it's three years that I wouldn't trade for anything. You couldn't have paid me a million dollars a year to do something different.” He was a Marine, then a cop for decades; he worked undercover investigating drug cartels and the Mexican mafia, as well as with the FBI on police corruption cases. As if that weren’t enough careers for one guy, he’s gone back undercover - now for International Justice Mission (IJM), which works to end slavery. The thing is, because of the nature of his work, we can’t tell you his name. Meet Investigator V. “Honestly, my first reaction was, what slavery? I don't believe that. The IJM recruiter told me, back in 2007, 'There's 27 million slaves in the world, we were wondering if you would come help us?' I instinctively said, 'No, there's not. How can that be?’” In this deeply moving episode, V tells Simon and Natasha stories of rescuing young girls from sex trafficking, and what it’s like when a rescue mission fails. He describes how it feels to encounter evil like this, and how he thinks - or tries to - about the perpetrators. And he explains why he wouldn’t prefer to be using his retirement to play golf - as nice as that would be.  "I don't think there's anything that can prepare you for a little girl being raped every day, or a young boy that's been enslaved and starving to death, and stand in front of him, and do undercover work and act like you're there for nefarious purposes. I don't know what preparation would prepare you for that … But I'll tell you what, being involved in this work has been so good. It's dark, it's evil, it's ugly, it's costly. But the joy and the purpose that comes from it is just hard to describe.” --- Find out more about IJM Australia here.

Life & Faith brings you some personal snapshots from Australia’s bushfire crisis.  --- “The refuge was very hot, it was very smoky, and there was no power. It’s nighttime - or at least the sun should have been rising, but it looked like nighttime … At one stage a number of us heard dull thud explosions in the distance. They were gas bottles - houses - so symbolising another house had just gone up. So we knew that the fire was in town.”  The whole world has been watching this summer as Australia burned. In total, the area burned out is almost the size of England. The loss of life, property, and wilderness has been devastating.  In this episode of Life & Faith, we give space to a few voices - the voices of ordinary people who’ve found themselves caught up in this crisis in some way, either voluntarily, or less so - in order to give some sense of how things have played out for a few individuals and communities. Air Force chaplain Michelle Philp, RFS volunteer Benjamin North, and Chris Mulherin - who lives in Melbourne but spends a couple of weeks after Christmas every year in Mallacoota, the epicentre of one of big fires - share their stories.  We hear about a concentration camp survivor who found, in the crisis, a way to overcome his fear of people in uniform. We hear of people responding with anger towards God - and of what happens when you make a bargain with God to save your house … and he comes through. Koalas also get a mention.  “One of the verses I’ve been reflecting on a lot is the verse where Jesus says, ‘Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest’. And that’s been my prayer for the people of the Adelaide Hills - that they will come to find rest in Jesus in amongst all their burdens and weariness, as they’re dealing with the bushfires.”  --- If you want to donate to the recovery effort after the bushfires, a useful list of ways you can help is available here.