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 happen.  Max discusses how we may admire heroes for their greatness – like Homer’s Achilles, for example – but we really long for goodness, expressed by saviours who willingly sacrifice themselves for others. Simon discusses how a quirk of the calendar can put Anzac Day and Easter in proximity to each other, bringing those two events and their focus on sacrifice into conversation.  Justine talks about death denial among the tech titans of Silicon Valley who hope to solve the problem of death. She argues that they express what life feels like if Easter Saturday – the day Jesus lay dead in the grave – is never followed by Easter Sunday – the day that changed everything, according to the Christian faith, because it is the day that Jesus rose to new life.  ---Explore: Natasha’s piece on Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis An article Simon wrote linking Anzac Day with Easter Sign up for the CPX newsletter here 

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 they’re dealing with a shocking medical episode in hospital or grappling with life in prison. This Life & Faith episode takes you behind the scenes of two very different environments: the intensive care unit of a major Sydney hospital, and Kirkconnell Correctional Centre in regional NSW. Two chaplains from Jericho Road, a social service organisation linked with the Presbyterian Church in NSW, tell us about what it’s like to care spiritually for people during very difficult times in their lives.  Content warning: there are some challenging stories told in these interviews. This episode is not suitable for children. ---Explore: Jericho Road’s Love Your Neighbour course on chaplaincySign up for CPX's regular email newsletter to find out more about our work.

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 these dialogues and modelled a brilliant way to disagree civilly.  Justin has just published a book called The Surprising Re-birth of Belief in God: Why New Atheism Grew Old and Secular Thinkers Are Considering Christianity Again. He detects a shift in the air and the possibility that the thoroughly secular vision of the world might not be cutting it for people today. Is that his imagination or might there be something to this? ---Explore: Justin’s latest book: https://justinbrierley.com/the-surprising-rebirth-of-belief-in-god/ And the podcast at: The Surprising Rebirth podcast: https://justinbrierley.com/surprisingrebirth/ Sign up for CPX's regular email newsletter to find out more about our work.

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.”—Pre-order Sarah Williams' biography of Josephine Butler, When Courage Calls.

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 occasion (yes, he was born on 29 February!) and Natasha Moore is due to head off on maternity leave soon, so Justine Toh joins them for a conversation about birthdays – that is, birth ... days. And midwife Jodie McIver, author of Bringing Forth Life: God’s Purposes in Pregnancy and Birth, offers some insights on the journey to becoming a parent, including how surprisingly frequently pregnancy and birth – in story and as metaphor – feature in the Bible. “I think the fact that God chooses birth to help us understand deep spiritual realities about his character and work in the world really gives honour to women’s bodies, and to these human experiences as well, as we kind of share in the cost of bringing forth life in our own little way.” --- EXPLORE Jodie McIver, Bringing Forth Life: God’s Purposes in Pregnancy and Birth A few other Life & Faith episodes related to birth, touching on disability, loss, infertility, and fostering: Speak Up, Show Up Intensive Care When Life Doesn’t Go to Plan Home Extension 

…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 charity, but also intentional, active investment in the lives of others. Matt also alludes to the way church seasons induct the believer into an entirely different order of time. He cites the work of Neil Postman, who said the clock was originally invented to help monks keep to their daily prayer schedule. In time, however, the clock, went beyond the monastery and conquered the rest of the world. Time is now subdivided into increasingly minute moments that all need to be filled. So, what does it mean to live according to the rhythms of sacred time? ---Explore Simon Smart’s Ash Wednesday article  Life & Faith episode with Matt Tan on the metaphysics of pornography Follow Awkward Asian Theologian on Instagram 

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, and Natasha Moore for a frank chat about the better and worse of these platforms in 2024. With cameos from Andy Crouch, CPX brand manager (and socials pro) Clare Potts, and recent social media quitter Jess Forsyth, the discussion ranges from whether group chats count as social media to whether the internet is “made of demons” - as well as the advantages (and disciplines) of being an iceberg vs an ocean liner.  --- EXPLORE: New York Times article How Group Chats Rule the World  Philippa Moore’s article about quitting social media  Paul Kingsnorth’s Substack essays The Universal and The Neon God Alan Jacobs’ New Atlantis piece Andy Crouch’s Spiritual Practices for Public Leadership 

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 Pileggi refuses to despair. As he prepares his Christmas 2023 message for the gathered locals and pilgrims, he remains convinced the story of the baby born down the road in Bethlehem 2000 years ago, remains the best hope for not only that troubled part of the world, but for all of us.  ---Christ church Jerusalem is the oldest protestant church in the Middle East 

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 the Anywhere-Somewhere divide explain contemporary polarisation and the gulf in people’s instincts? The terms belong to David Goodhart, author of The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics and Head, Hand, Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century.  People in the Anywhere class, Goodhart says, tend to be well-educated, mobile, and cosmopolitan, making up about 20-25% of the national population. Their Somewhere counterparts, on the other hand, tend to be more rooted in their local communities, perhaps more conservative and communitarian, and make up 50% of the population. Neither worldview is better or worse, he argues, but Anywheres tend to run the country, and don’t reliably read the national room. For Goodhart, this explains the cry for recognition of recent populist movements – and raises the question of where someone might seek what Goodhart calls “unconditional recognition”. “The institutions that gave people unconditional recognition like the family, like the church or indeed the nation, all of these things are weaker and the weakening of that unconditional recognition bears most heavily on the people who are the lowest achievers, as it were, in modern liberal democracies.” -- Explore David’s book The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics David’s book Head, Hand, Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century David’s “Too Diverse?” essay for Prospect  Brigid Delaney’s piece in The Guardian after the 2019 federal election The LSE blog post on British Parliament’s “class problem” The SMH report on the backgrounds of Australia’s federal MPs 

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 disagree.  Natasha highlights beloved Australian author Helen Garner’s encounter with an angel and our flirtation with the supernatural through occasions like Halloween, before taking us through the supernatural stylings of the latest Poirot film A Haunting in Venice, based (extremely loosely) on Agatha Christie’s 1969 novel Hallowe’en Party.  Simon has been reading the biography of tennis icon and former World No. 1 Andre Agassi who, it turns out, hated tennis and wrestled with fame, but discovered that helping people is the “only perfection there is”.  A world that has cast off religion and the transcendent also leaves behind any account of the good life that goes along with those claims. Yet Agassi discovered that being the best tennis player in the world didn’t fulfil him. Only serving others did, which resonates with the Christian claim that the good life is a life lived for others.  And Justine raves about Susannah Clarke’s novel Piranesi and its vivid portrayal of what the disenchanted view of the world lacks: wonder, deep communion with the world, joy, and hope. Plus, Justine makes a bold claim:  Susannah Clarke is the 21st-century successor to C.S. Lewis. -- Explore Helen Garner describing her angelic encounter at the 2018 Sydney Writers’ Festival (from 30 mins) Sean Kelly’s column mentioning Hilary Mantel’s possibly demonic encounter Trailer for A Haunting in Venice Natasha’s article on Halloween, published in the Sydney Morning Herald Andre Agassi’s Open: An Autobiography The Guardian’s interview with Susannah Clarke Piranesi by Susannah Clarke Wikipedia entry on the real-life Piranesi, the 18th-century architect and artist