Life & Faith

Alison Milbank on why Tolkien and Middle-Earth exercise such a hold over us. --- “It does suggest that within the real world there are portals - thin places, if you like, where we can pass to other worlds and return. And I think that’s what the best fantasy [literature] does. It gives you an understanding of this world as much richer, much deeper than we normally realise.” When J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings came out on top of the Waterstones Books of the Century poll in 1997, Germaine Greer voiced the frustration of fantasy sceptics everywhere. “It has been my nightmare that Tolkien would turn out to be the most influential writer of the twentieth century,” she wrote. "The bad dream has materialised … The books that come in Tolkien’s train are more or less what you would expect; flight from reality is their dominating characteristic." Fantasy: those who love it really love it … and for others, it doesn’t do a thing. In this conversation with theologian and literary scholar Alison Milbank, Life & Faith delves into Ents, elves, enchantment, escapism, the enduring appeal of Middle-Earth, and why Tolkien went everywhere by bicycle. Milbank believes that humans have “a natural desire for the supernatural”. She explains why she loves unicorns, and why she’s not so sure fairies aren’t real. And she makes a case for the importance of imagination in reasoning, in doing science, and even in politics. “To be human is to want to exceed what you are … For all of us, it doesn’t matter how wonderful your spouse or your lover is, they can never wholly satisfy you. It doesn’t matter how much money you have, it will never wholly satisfy you. That’s just the way we are. And the fact that we can never stay in the object isn’t saying that we shouldn’t get married, or we shouldn’t love people, or even that we shouldn’t enjoy the things of this world. It’s just saying that they can’t give us everything. There’s something in us that just wants more ... a kind of homesickness for something we’ve never had.” --- SUBSCRIBE to Life & Faith on Apple Podcasts: http://bit.ly/cpxpodcast OR on Spotify: http://cpx.video/spotify FIND US on Facebook: www.facebook.com/publicchristianity FOLLOW US on Twitter: www.twitter.com/cpx_tweet

Why are we so polarised? Tim Dixon offers not just a diagnosis, but actual solutions. --- “It’s much easier to hold very hostile prejudicial views of other people if you actually don’t know them personally.” Tim Dixon is co-founder of More in Common, an international initiative which has published some of the world's leading research on the drivers of polarisation and social division. He worked as chief speechwriter and economic adviser to two Australian Prime Ministers. He’s helped start and grow social movement organisations around the world to protect civilians in Syria, address modern-day slavery, promote gun control in the US, and engage faith communities in social justice. He’s concerned about how our social glue is coming unstuck - and what that might mean for the future. “We are living in a pre-something period … The forces that are driving us apart are growing, they're intensifying. If we don’t pay serious attention to how we bring people back together and transcend these divisions, if we continue to play the kind of toxic politics that has been characteristic of the last few years, I think we’re headed in a very, very dangerous direction.” Tim speaks with Simon Smart on a visit to Oz to give CPX’s annual Richard Johnson Lecture, “Crossing the Great Divide: Building bridges in an age of tribalism”. Both his research and his personal story mean that he’s better placed than almost anyone to make sense of our echo chambers, our battles over national identity, and the predicament of the “exhausted majority”. And he goes well beyond diagnosis, to propose actual solutions to polarisation. “It is out of terrible catastrophe good things can come. In a sense, as a Christian, I think of that in the context of the resurrection ... there is something about the second chance, the renewal, the fact that we’re not always stuck in the story that we seem to be a part of.” --- SUBSCRIBE to Life & Faith on Apple Podcasts: http://bit.ly/cpxpodcast OR on Spotify: http://cpx.video/spotify FIND US on Facebook: www.facebook.com/publicchristianity FOLLOW US on Twitter: www.twitter.com/cpx_tweet

Philosopher and theologian John Milbank on left vs right, Harry Potter, and how none of us behave like we’re just atoms. --- If you’re wanting a crash course on “isms” like liberalism, secularism, and populism from anyone, it’s John Milbank. In this wide-ranging conversation with Simon Smart, the philosopher and theologian has a way of never saying quite what you expect him to. He questions the idea that left and right are really in opposition to each other, calls the final Harry Potter book “a profound theological meditation”, and is enthusiastic about people’s longing for paganism. What does he think Christianity might give people that’s surprising? “Pleasure,” he replies immediately. “It would make their lives far more interesting, exciting, and pleasurable - and physical, because they’re essentially alienated from their bodies if they think their bodies are just bits of matter.” Does he think a revival of religion is on the cards? “The reason I do think religion may revive is that it is on the side of common sense … all the time people behave as if they had minds, as if they had souls, as if the good, the true, and the beautiful, the right and wrong, were real - and yet the scientific discourses which we have, or rather their scientistic reductive modes, can’t really allow the reality of any of these things.” From politics to angels, Milbank turns his formidable intellect on some of the quirks and contradictions of our time. --- SUBSCRIBE to Life & Faith on Apple Podcasts: http://bit.ly/cpxpodcast OR on Spotify: http://cpx.video/spotify FIND US on Facebook: www.facebook.com/publicchristianity FOLLOW US on Twitter: www.twitter.com/cpx_tweet

A Nigerian YouTuber who's made a name for herself asking hard questions of powerful people. --- “I’m trying to wake people up. Not just in Nigeria - I talk about [other] African countries as well so that they can know we have a lot in common, and so that we can all together demand better governance and make our leaders accountable.” Adeola Fayehun is a Nigerian journalist who’s built a global following with her YouTube show Keeping It Real with Adeola. It’s a satirical and fearless take on news that matters. In 2015, Adeola made headlines worldwide for accosting Robert Mugabe, the long-time ruler of Zimbabwe, and asking when he was going to give up power. She regularly takes aim at the corruption of both political and religious leaders who she says are “scamming” their people. “Whether they listen and change or not, at least they know that someone is watching … at least I can say I tried. Some day, if my kids say, ‘While all this was happening, Mama, what did you do?' I can be like, go on YouTube! I did a little something.” In the first episode of Life & Faith for 2019, Adeola talks to Natasha Moore about vocation, Mugabe, pastors with private jets, and growing up as a missionary kid. "Honestly I wouldn’t do what I’m doing today if not for the grace of God. I wouldn’t have been able to stand in the face of the attacks, and the backlash, and the threats. And so when people say, are you not afraid? - it’s not really me … if I don’t do what I’m doing, I don’t have peace." -- SUBSCRIBE to Life & Faith on Apple Podcasts: http://bit.ly/cpxpodcast OR on Spotify: http://cpx.video/spotify FIND US on Facebook: www.facebook.com/publicchristianity FOLLOW US on Twitter: www.twitter.com/cpx_tweet

Simon, Natasha, and John share the stories behind their favourite Christmas carols. --- It’s not quite a Bridget Jones-style situation – sobbing into shiraz and lip-syncing to “All by myself” on Christmas eve – but this year, Justine Toh is all alone in the recording booth for Life and Faith. Regular hosts Simon Smart and Natasha Moore have scarpered off before Christmas, with Simon on long service leave in Canada and Natasha off to the U.S. for a white Christmas. So Justine delves into the back catalogue of Life and Faith and unearths a gem: an episode from 2014 where Simon, Natasha, and John Dickson share their favourite Christmas carols and the stories behind them. John explains why Hark the Herald Angels Sing isn’t just a beautiful tune but expresses rich theological truths in poetic form. He also discusses how Christmas carols often speak of two advents, or comings, of Jesus: his lowly birth as that baby in the manger and his promised return in glory. Natasha relates the fascinating history behind her favourite carol O Holy Night that, among other things, briefly halted the Franco-Prussian war in 1870 as French and German soldiers called a Christmas truce, and was the first song to be broadcast on the radio in 1906. Simon, invoking Scrooge from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, bah humbugs about the way Away in a Manger, as he sees it, diminishes the powerful idea of the incarnation: the Christian claim that God became fully human in Jesus. “The sweet baby Jesus we’re hearing about in this carol – you don’t get any sense that he might actually grow up at any point. This idea that even as a baby ‘no crying he makes’ – I just want to throw up when I hear that bit,” Simon says. “That’s not the Christian story. Jesus is meant to be fully God and fully human, and he’s not fully human if he doesn’t cry.” Reflecting on the year when planes disappeared into the Indian Ocean, or were shot down over the Ukraine, and that ended with the Sydney siege at the Lindt Café in Martin Place, John says that the Christmas message remains one of joy, even in a gloomy time. “It’d be wrong to think that Christmas was about happiness. It is about joy though, that sense that despite everything, God is for us and he’s come towards us as one of us. And that does give a perspective and hope that is real joy.” --- SUBSCRIBE to Life & Faith on Apple Podcasts: http://bit.ly/cpxpodcast OR on Spotify: http://cpx.video/spotify FIND US on Facebook: www.facebook.com/publicchristianity FOLLOW US on Twitter: www.twitter.com/cpx_tweet

An exploration of the role of emotional, social, and especially spiritual care in modern medicine. --- “Physical and psychological disruption have obvious spiritual consequences, and spiritual disruption has physical consequences. One of the things we know is that when people feel hopeless, their physical well-being suffers. So if hope is connected to spirituality, then spirituality is connected to medicine – that seems obvious to me.” The Reverend Doctor Andrew Sloane is a theology lecturer in Sydney. As a former doctor, he’s spent a lot of time studying how the Christian faith intersects with the practice of medicine. In 2016, he published a book on this very subject, titled Vulnerability and Care: Christian Reflections on the Philosophy of Medicine. It looks at questions like, “How important is it for doctors to practice medicine holistically?”, “What is the place of spirituality in healthcare?”, “How can morality be incorporated into medical curricula?”, and even, “What is medicine all about anyway?” – a question to which he gives a rather surprising answer. This week on Life & Faith is our 300th episode, and it’s produced by our inaugural youth podcast competition winner, Shaddy Hanna. Shaddy is a fourth-year medical student from the University of New South Wales, and his pitch was all about identity, spirituality, and holistic medicine. He’s worked with the team to research and shape this episode, in which he chats with Andrew Sloane about why medicine is fundamentally about caring for the vulnerable, and how a focus on measurable health outcomes often has the effect of devaluing the emotional and spiritual dimensions to health. “I think it’s very important that we never think that only the things that can be measured count. We often think that if it can’t be counted then it doesn’t count – and that’s just wrong. Most of the things that matter most to us, in fact, are things that can’t be counted or measured – things like love, and relationships, and a sense that our life has made some kind of contribution to the world, that it’s been a valuable thing all in all.” We also hear from a GP from the Central Coast of New South Wales who has spent the best part of the last decade working in hospitals, clinics, and community health programs across Africa – most recently, in a refugee camp in South Sudan. She thinks Australian doctors have some things to learn from the developing world about how to care for a patient holistically. “We really need to give thanks for Western medicine and how we can do great things to improve people’s health - but we also need to learn from those in the developing world context who are more accepting of death as part of the cycle of life. When someone’s really close to death, maybe we just need to pay more attention to the emotional and spiritual side of things rather than trying to fix or prevent death happening.”    Join us for this important conversation about the goals and practice of healthcare in Australia and overseas, and what, if anything, modern medicine can learn from the life of Jesus. --- SUBSCRIBE to Life & Faith on Apple Podcasts: http://bit.ly/cpxpodcast OR on Spotify: http://cpx.video/spotify FIND US on Facebook: www.facebook.com/publicchristianity FOLLOW US on Twitter: www.twitter.com/cpx_tweet 

It took a famous atheist philosopher to shake the foundations of Sarah Irving-Stonebraker’s atheism. --- “A few months into my time at Oxford, my friends and I heard that a very famous atheist philosopher known as Peter Singer was coming to give a series of lectures. The lectures were on the topic of ethics – do we have any duties to other people? Do human lives have any value? So I went to these lectures really excited, and I was expecting that, as an atheist, I’d be hearing exactly the sort of ethics that I subscribed to. But actually, what I heard floored me.” Sarah Irving-Stonebraker knew she wanted to be an historian from when she was eight years old. From Sydney to Cambridge, then Oxford, followed by a tenure-track job in Florida, things went very much to plan. What she didn’t expect was her journey from atheism to Christian faith. In this episode of Life & Faith, Sarah tells the story of discovering that neither the Christian nor the atheist worldview were quite what she thought they were. Through her academic research, as she read the work of early modern scientists and was surprised by how influential their faith was for them, and through an encounter with the logic of eminent philosopher Peter Singer, she came to question how her deepest convictions about humans and morality fit with her belief that God did not exist. She’s quick to add that when she eventually did become a Christian, that didn’t just make all her problems go away. But it did change things dramatically for her. “Christianity isn’t some kind of self-help doctrine. It’s not probiotics for the soul. But there was an immediate sense that I had an enormous burden lifted from me. That had a lot to do with not thinking that I had to earn my self-worth anymore. I had this immediate rest for my soul – that no matter what else was going on in life, that ultimately, my soul had rest.” Success, identity, human rights, what history has to tell us about human nature, and more: Sarah’s very academic but also very personal story is one for all of us, as we figure out what it is we believe, and why. --- SUBSCRIBE to Life & Faith on Apple Podcasts: http://bit.ly/cpxpodcast OR on Spotify: http://cpx.video/spotify FIND US on Facebook: www.facebook.com/publicchristianity FOLLOW US on Twitter: www.twitter.com/cpx_tweet 

Courage, blindness, unexpected romance, and a meeting of cultures: the story of missionary Amy Oxley Wilkinson. --- “In about 1944, when Amy was in the East End of London with her grandson, they went into a Chinese restaurant, and the whole restaurant stood up, and she spoke to them in Chinese. She was English – well, she was Australian! – but this part of China was in her heart.” This scene would have been unimaginable to Amy Oxley Wilkinson back when she was a young girl growing up west of Sydney. In the 1890s, as a single woman, and knowing full well the possible dangers – from cholera to the very real threat of violence – she moved to China as a nurse and missionary. Rob and Linda Banks have pieced together Amy’s story in their book They Shall See His Face: The Story of Amy Oxley Wilkinson and her Visionary Blind School in China. In this interview, they share some of her experiences in early-20th-century China, and beyond: the challenges she faced, her unlikely romance, and the legacy of all her work with blind children, which flourishes to this day. “The other thing is that they didn’t live within the missionary compound – they were outside, in the city, so they were as open to being devastated by typhoons and disease and so on, like anyone else. They lived with the people. And that was deeply respected by all the different levels within Chinese culture – such as the Confucianists and other literati who came together on recognising Amy, because they realised she was an asset to their community.” --- Rob and Linda Banks are also the authors of View from the Faraway Pagoda, which tells the story of another Australian missionary in China. Their new book is called They Shall See His Face: The Story of Amy Oxley Wilkinson and her Visionary Blind School in China. Buy it here: www.koorong.com/search/product/they-shall-see-his-face-the-story-of/9780647519776.jhtml SUBSCRIBE to Life & Faith on Apple Podcasts: http://bit.ly/cpxpodcast FIND US on Facebook: www.facebook.com/publicchristianity FOLLOW US on Twitter: www.twitter.com/cpx_tweet   

Professor Sarah Williams on the importance of language and history when it comes to gender. — “We have lost the language for talking about any form of biological determinism. Gender has replaced the word sex, which is ironic given the fact that it was introduced to create the possibility of nuance.” Questions about gender are a big part of the zeitgeist – they’re incredibly important for us at this point in history, and incredibly charged. It’s interesting to discover, then, that the word “gender” is a relatively new addition to the English language. The idea of gender, though, has a long and complicated history. Professor Sarah Williams from Regent College in Vancouver has been mapping the history of gender. In this episode, we take a deep dive into that history, and how we’ve arrived at the understandings we have today. Plus, we discover the key roles that the Bible, and Christianity, played in gender equality and women’s rights movements. “Somewhere along the line, Christianity has been written out of the feminist narrative and of the women’s movement. Women like Josephine Butler, who argued very strongly from a Christian perspective it was essential for the woman to have the vote, using Christian theology as the basis of her political philosophy. The late modern feminist doesn’t quite know what to do with Christianity being a radical force for women, rather than a subjugating force for women. And as a Christian feminist myself, it matters a lot to me that we recover this part of the history of feminism.” — SUBSCRIBE to Life & Faith on Apple Podcasts: http://bit.ly/cpxpodcast FIND US on Facebook: www.facebook.com/publicchristianity FOLLOW US on Twitter: www.twitter.com/cpx_tweet 

We look back on the span of World War I through the prism of one man’s life – and death. --- The centenary of the end of World War I is not an easy one to know what to do with. The relief on the faces of those captured in photos from 11 November 1918, celebrating in the streets, is palpable. But the futility of the long war, and our knowledge, looking back, of what was still to come, make the anniversary a muted one. To mark the occasion, in this episode of Life & Faith, Natasha Moore brings you extracts from a 2015 documentary about one particular Australian soldier – and how the ripple effects of this one life (and death) reflect the unfathomable cost of the war for a whole society. “A bullet struck him right here – in the Bible that he carried in his breast pocket. Now he had it back to front in his pocket, which means that, because it was a New Testament and Psalms, the bullet went through Psalms, and then Revelation, and then went through all of Paul’s epistles and stopped at John’s Gospel.” Bullet in the Bible tells the story of Elvas Jenkins: from outback Australia to Egypt; from the scrabbly hills of Gallipoli to the Western Front; from a home-grown romance to the story of a miraculous escape, it traces the beauty and tragedy of a life caught up in the times, and of the life that might have been. This is also the story of a serendipitous encounter, almost a century later, and the piecing together of Elvas’ experience through the rediscovery of his trusty battlefront Bible.  --- BUY Bullet in the Bible: https://www.koorong.com/search/product/bullet-in-the-bible/9780647519349.jhtml SUBSCRIBE to Life & Faith on Apple Podcasts: http://bit.ly/cpxpodcast FIND US on Facebook: www.facebook.com/publicchristianity FOLLOW US on Twitter: www.twitter.com/cpx_tweet