Life & Faith

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: www.bit.ly/cpxpodcast 

Exploring the beauty of maths, we may just find that faith and proof are not mutually exclusive. --- "An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God." - Srinivasa Ramanujan. Ramanujan was a self-taught mathematical genius from India, who moved to Cambridge University in 1914 to work with the eminent mathematician, G. H. Hardy. His story, as told in the movie The Man Who Knew Infinity, is not only one of a brilliant mind capable of remarkable work, but of an unlikely friendship between a devout Hindu, and an atheist who was a stickler for proofs. "Your theorem is wrong," Hardy tells Ramanujan in the movie, "this is why we cannot publish anymore until you finally trust me on this business of proofs." Once described as "the most romantic figure in recent mathematical history", Ramanujan’s life also speaks to the idea of finding beauty in maths - and this is what we explore in this episode of Life & Faith. You’ll hear from a leading Australian mathematician about her response to the film, and her sense of the relationship between divine reality and mathematical practice. Then, Oxford mathematics professor John Lennox shares his thoughts about the beauty of the world of numbers and patterns. We wrap up the episode with a poem written and read by former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams - you won’t want to miss it. "Why are numbers beautiful? It's like asking why is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony beautiful. If you don't see why, someone can't tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren't beautiful, nothing is." - Paul Erdős --- This episode was first broadcast on 30 June 2016.

Dr Luke Barnes talks science, rationality, and the wonders of the night sky. --- "We’ve described the way the world works. We haven’t in any way explained why it’s there in the first place." In this episode, we celebrate National Science Week with Dr Luke Barnes, an astrophysicist with the Sydney Institute of Astronomy. Join us as we unravel the mysteries of the universe (sort of); find out if stars truly are the great lion kings of the past looking down on us; ask what an orderly world suggests about the possibility of a 'Rational Mind' behind it all – and more. And he encourages all of us to look into the night sky and take a moment to contemplate the universe. "I think it’s very good to be reminded of how small we are." --- Purchase your copy of, A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely-Tuned Cosmos: www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~luke/book/ Find out more about National Science Week: www.scienceweek.net.au Subscribe to our podcast: www.bit.ly/cpxpodcast

For actor Anna McGahan, Christianity flipped the logic of life and of the entertainment industry. --- "It’s weird because I was the kid that put on plays – and I was aggressive, I would make everyone do a play if we were hanging out with family, friends … However, I was much more interested in science, and I was interested in dance, and I wanted to be an author and an astronomer and a journalist. And I didn’t really consider acting at all." Anna McGahan was partway through a degree in psychology when she decided to pursue acting as a career. In 2012, Anna won the Heath Ledger Scholarship, and she has since appeared in several Australian television series including Underbelly, House Husbands and Anzac Girls. But there was something about her profession, and her success, that she didn’t feel completely comfortable with. "I had always really hoped that I could be somebody that would give something good to the world, that would actually contribute. And I was desperately afraid that I hadn’t really contributed much but some half-popular television." So she started looking for answers, and found them in the place she least expected to - and least wanted to. "I had been trained in liberal arts education, I had come from the LGBT community, and I had come from a group of people that had felt so rejected by the church ... I used to walk around and say, 'I don’t judge anyone – except for Christians'." But Anna started investigating Christianity, going to church, reading the Bible, and discovering the person of Jesus Christ. "If this is true, it will change the whole world - and I don’t understand why no one’s told me about him before." In this episode, Anna McGahan speaks with us backstage from the Justice Conference in Melbourne where she was performing a play she co-wrote with Joel McKerrow, People of the Sun. Anna gives us insight into the life of an actor, why she decided to investigate Christianity, and how it’s completely changed her life and work. --- FIND OUT MORE about the Justice Conference: www.thejusticeconference.com.au READ Anna McGahan’s blog, ‘A Forbidden Room’: www.aforbiddenroom.com SUBSCRIBE to our podcast: www.bit.ly/cpxpodcast

  How a music professor uses playlists and sing-a-longs to engage people living with dementia. --- Ivy is 105 years old and she loves music. She sings along to "old-timers" in the car when she’s traveling around Australia, and listens to "sad" songs before she goes to bed. "I usually have the music playing softly," she says, "I go to sleep that way." The truth is, Ivy hasn’t done that for a while. She lives with dementia and has been a resident at a care home in Sydney’s north for the past couple of years. Her carers tell me that Ivy goes to bed pretty early, around 5pm, and she doesn’t have a radio or music player in her room. Instead, Ivy has an iPod loaded with a personalised playlist of songs for her to enjoy. It was given to her as part of Hammondcare’s new music engagement program designed by former music professor, Dr Kirsty Beilharz. So, what’s on her playlist? "I like all the old time songs," Ivy says, before the conversation suddenly shifts to why she didn’t learn how to play the piano. "My mother tried to make me learn but I was too much of a larrikin," she says. In this episode, we speak with residents, a care worker and Dr Beilharz, about the unique and powerful way music and singing can connect with people living with dementia. --- This episode was first broadcast on 12 May 2016.

How a spinal cord injury revealed to Shane Clifton both the wonder and fragility of life. --- "I landed upside down in the pit and I knew immediately I had broken my neck. I couldn’t move anything. I yelled out to my wife, and she thought I was joking at first. I remember just apologising to my wife. There was this sense that I’d done something I knew was going to impact our whole family drastically." There are a lot of words you could use to describe Shane Clifton: husband, father, professor, theologian. When you meet him you’ll notice that he’s in a wheelchair, because Shane is also a quadriplegic. But one word we’re not using to describe him is "inspiration". "As soon as you say, 'that’s amazing because they’re disabled!' you’re actually diminishing what it is they’ve achieved. My point would be to do your best to treat people as people." In this episode, Shane tells the story of how a freak accident led to him becoming a quadriplegic. He also explains his problem with the "positivity myth", and shares his insights on what the Bible and Christianity have to say about disability. "The cycle of life, the wonder and the joy of life, all the good things that we’ve got in life, are connected to the cycle of fragility and vulnerability. ... If I can accept the wonder of the cycle of life, I guess I have to accept the consequences of that too, which in my case was a spinal cord injury." --- SUBSCRIBE to 'Life & Faith' on Apple Podcasts (or wherever you get your podcasts): http://bit.ly/cpxpodcast BUY Shane Clifton’s book, Husbands Should Not Break: A Memoir about the Pursuit of Happiness after Spinal Cord Injury: http://wipfandstock.com/husbands-should-not-break.html 

A songwriter and a philosopher contemplate death, loss and what it means to grieve well. --- Nothing in life is certain but death and taxes. But if death is something we all face at some point, and grief is part of the human experience, we talk about them surprisingly little. In fact, it’s something we don’t necessarily do all that well as a culture. "The word death is not pronounced in New York, in Paris, in London, because it burns the lips," wrote the poet Octavio Paz in 1961. His words still ring true today. Some of us, like musician Phil Davidson, eventually find a way to deal with sorrow after the loss of a loved one. "I could hear the foghorns of the ships that were leaving Belfast harbour and going out to sea," Phil says about that night after he last saw Agnes, his grandmother, alive. "I was lying there just thinking about my grandmother, I could hear these foghorns, and I’m thinking these ships are kind of all lost at sea. I thought that’s a great kind of analogy of how I was feeling." So he got up and started writing Ballymena Agnes. It was his way of connecting with his emotions and working through his grief. For philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff, it has been a different journey. His son died at 25 years of age in a mountain climbing accident. When he turned to philosophical attempts to explain this loss, he didn’t find any of them compelling. "So I live with unanswered questions," he says. "I continue to have faith in that there is a creator of this universe and that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, but how I fit that altogether with the early death of a beloved son … I live with the question." In this episode, we explore the tension that is presented in the face of death. On the one hand, the Christian faith says that death is much worse than we think and our instincts are right, it’s really not ok. But it also says that there’s far more hope and comfort to be found in the face of death, more than we might imagine. --- SUBSCRIBE to ‘Life & Faith’ on Apple Podcasts (or wherever you get your podcasts): http://bit.ly/cpxpodcast  READ Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Lament for a Son: http://amzn.to/1Vh6TMd  LISTEN to Phil Davidson’s music: http://bit.ly/phildavidsonfb  --- This episode was first broadcast on 21 April 2016.

An historian, a poet, and a former lawyer discuss the Bible in Australian history and culture. --- "I think [the Bible] is a good book," says poet Lachlan Brown, "but I do think it’s been used in terrible ways." Lachlan Brown, historian Meredith Lake and former lawyer Roy Williams were panellists at a 2017 Sydney Writers’ Festival event titled "The Good Book? The Bible in Australian Culture Today". In this episode, we look at the role of the Bible in Australian society and culture throughout history - its influence on the treatment of Aboriginal people, on Australian literature, and even the small - but significant - pacifist movement in Australia during World War I. "So we’ve got this tradition of non-violence," Meredith Lake says. "It’s a minority tradition, but the Bible’s 'blessed are the peacemakers', and when Christ said 'put your sword away, Peter', those are really powerful. They give us a counter-narrative to the kind of nation we want to be." And hear from the panellists about their personal connection to this book. "It makes sense of the world like no other book that I've ever read,” says Roy Williams. “There are still mysteries of course, but it stands up superbly." --- Lachlan Brown’s book of poetry is Limited Cities, and Roy Williams’ book is titled God, Actually. You can find them in bookstores and online. Meredith Lake’s new book about the Bible and its contested reception in Australia will be published in late 2017. SUBSCRIBE to Life & Faith on Apple Podcasts (or wherever you get your podcasts): http://bit.ly/cpxpodcast

Marilynne Robinson on the beauty, ingenuity and tragedy of being an exceptional human. --- The human brain is the most complex object known to exist in the universe. This is the thought that Marilynne Robinson begins many of her classes with. The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and acclaimed essayist is a Professor at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop. "I want to encourage my young writers to value their characters sufficiently to make them complex enough to be credible and also to value themselves in a way that makes them push toward real authenticity, real originality," she says. Human exceptionalism is something that comes across not only in the characters she writes about, but in the way she treats her readers. Robinson’s latest offering, The Givenness of Things, builds bridges across science and religion, theology and humanism, to provide a gracious, respectful, and ultimately hopeful contribution to public culture and conversation about life and what it means to be human. "We know that given any possibility, human beings blossom into beauty and ingenuity and tragedy and all the rest of it that could not be anticipated and that the world would be utterly cruel without," she says. This conversation comes from Simon Smart's interview with Marilynne Robinson for CPX's documentary, For the Love of God: How the church is better and worse than you ever imagined. --- SIGN UP for our Director’s Pass for a glimpse behind the scenes of the making of our documentary: https://fortheloveofgodproject.com SUBSCRIBE to Life & Faith on Apple Podcasts: http://bit.ly/cpxpodcast READ Natasha Moore’s review of The Givenness of Things: http://ab.co/1oqtqI6  --- This episode was first broadcast on 2 June 2016.

How one couple found love, peace and hope, while seeking asylum in Australia. --- "With courage let us all combine." This is the theme for Refugee Week in Australia. It’s a phrase taken from the second verse of the Australian national anthem, a verse that also includes these words: "For those who've come across the seas, we've boundless plains to share." It’s not hard to see a disconnect between these sentiments and Australia’s recent immigration policies. But, the reality - when you’re an asylum seeker or refugee living in the Australian community - is mixed. "We were never living in peace before, in our previous life. But here we find, in Christianity, love and peace." In this episode, we speak to a couple from Iran who are seeking asylum in Australia. The process for them has been long and the future is still uncertain, but they have many friends to help them, and their Christian faith gives them hope. "You can be like a bird, free, free … and you don’t have to think about many problems. It will be solved if you pray." Also, Justine and Simon discuss what it really means to "welcome the stranger".  --- *Davood and Sara are not their real names. For more information about Refugee Week, please visit: http://www.refugeeweek.org.au/ SUBSCRIBE to Life & Faith on Apple Podcasts (or wherever you get your podcasts): http://bit.ly/cpxpodcast