Matters of Life and Death

You may not have read too much about it, but the current outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is by far the most serious for years, and remains far from under control months after it began. This week we interview Giles Cattermole, a British emergency doctor who has just come back from a month volunteering at a makeshift hospital in the heart of the epidemic. We talk about what life is like trying to care for people with an incurable and highly infectious disease in rural Africa, what motivated him as a Christian to risk his life to head to the midst of the crisis, and why the West seems so apathetic and uncaring about this horrific disease cutting a swathe through the DRC. Find out more about Samaritan’s Purse’s work combatting Ebola - https://www.samaritans-purse.org.uk/EbolaResponse The US CDC’s page on the latest on the Ebola outbreak - https://www.cdc.gov/ebola/situation-summary/index.html Africa CDC also has information on the Ebola epidemic - https://africacdc.org/bundibugyo-virus-disease-bvd-ebola-outbreak/ • You can send in your questions for us to discuss on the podcast, or ideas for future episodes, to [email protected] • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com • Find some of Tim's journalism and sign up for free to his weekly church news newsletter The Critical Friend: https://tswyatt.com • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

The Church of England has been for several years embarked on a highly controversial plan to spend £100m of its historic assets to try and make amends for the way its institutions profited from investments in the slave trade centuries ago. Plenty of other denominations are also wrestling with similar dark legacies from their past. Should the church of today be held morally accountable for the sins of their forebears? Are financial transactions the best way to atone for the past anyway? And can we still trace the impact of the enslavement and oppression of Africans centuries ago in the Western church even to this day? To discuss this, Tim is joined by Richard Reddie, the director of justice and inclusion at Churches Together in Britain and Ireland. • You can send in your questions for us to discuss on the podcast, or ideas for future episodes, to [email protected] • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com • Find some of Tim's journalism and sign up for free to his weekly church news newsletter The Critical Friend: https://tswyatt.com • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

A new study has revealed that ordinary people in both America and China are fairly strongly in favour of so-called liberal eugenics – using genetic screening to choose your own children’s non-medical traits like IQ, appearance or even personality. Medical and scientific figures tend to be opposed to using advanced polygenic screening for anything beyond serious medical conditions, worried by the ethics over ‘designer babies’ and unintended consequences. But is it fair or feasible in the long-term for elites to refuse to grant access to a technology which appears to have substantial backing within society? But first, we discuss a major legal defeat for the tech firm Meta, which has settled an £18bn lawsuit by most of the state attorney generals in the US over the harm caused by its social media apps Facebook and Instagram. This is the latest in a series of courtroom setbacks for Meta and other Silicon Valley giants, who are being forced into placing more restrictions on teenagers using their addictive and ubiquitous social networks. • You can send in your questions for us to discuss on the podcast, or ideas for future episodes, to [email protected] • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com • Find some of Tim's journalism and sign up for free to his weekly church news newsletter The Critical Friend: https://tswyatt.com • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

There has recently been a slew of stories about cutting-edge AI models which have apparently broken out of their sandbox digital playgrounds and escaped onto the open internet and conducted sophisticated and deceptive hacking operations, all without their tech company owners being aware of it. Tim is sceptical this sounds like marketing guff, but John thinks otherwise and says it may be time society properly considered both the risks of this kinds of semi-autonomous AI software and in theological terms how we should think about them. Smarter than any animal and capable of rational, independent decision-making, and yet clearly not the same as a human being made in the image of God: do we need some kind of novel philosophical category to discuss AI agents? • You can send in your questions for us to discuss on the podcast, or ideas for future episodes, to [email protected] • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com • Find some of Tim's journalism and sign up for free to his weekly church news newsletter The Critical Friend: https://tswyatt.com • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

After decades of rapid expansion and booming student numbers, the British university sector is gripped by a financial crisis. Dozens of institutions are trying to make major cuts, gutting entire departments and making thousands of academic staff redundant. This week we are joined by two Christian university professors, who are each trying to face down their own university’s cuts to staff, to discuss the roots of this crisis, but also why it should matter to the church more broadly. We talk about the Christian origins of the idea of the university itself and how their goal to unveil knowledge about the world might be a surprisingly godly one. But we also discuss the growth of managers and administrators (something familiar to many denominations), if university education really is a universal public good, and if it was a mistake to turn universities from an elite pursuit for a tiny academically-minded minority into the default method of training young adults for the workplace. The series of blogs on the university crisis recommended by Nick Megoran are here: https://isrf.org/search?q=&tags%5b%5d=he-dispatches&type=posts John Heathershaw’s own writing on the topic is here: https://johnheathershaw.substack.com/p/the-crisis-in-britains-universities • You can send in your questions for us to discuss on the podcast, or ideas for future episodes, to [email protected] • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com • Find some of Tim's journalism and sign up for free to his weekly church news newsletter The Critical Friend: https://tswyatt.com • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

Two quickfire topics for today’s episode. A listener writes in with some concern about a BBC article which explored the growing trend of people celebrating their choice to not have children, known online as being ‘childfree’. Is it a problem if people wish to rid the social stigma or shame about not having kids, in a world in which birthrates continue to plummet? And what does the Christian tradition think about people opting out of parenthood because they want to focus on their career, be able to travel more, or just don’t feel they have the emotional resources to raise children? But first, we look at a pioneering medical science breakthrough, after an American surgical team successfully corrected an intestinal problem while a child was still in the womb. The media reporting on this has been understandably celebratory, but it does raise the question of doublethink in a culture which simultaneously lionises doctors for saving ‘babies’ while pre-term and also defends the rights of those same doctors to abort other children with the same congenital disabilities or health concerns if that is the mother’s wish. The two articles we refer to in today’s episode: These women said no to having kids - here's why - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cz0jx2z2l41o Woman has pioneering womb surgery to fix 'miracle' baby with intestines outside its body https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c86ngegz9qno • You can send in your questions for us to discuss on the podcast, or ideas for future episodes, to [email protected] • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com • Find some of Tim's journalism and sign up for free to his weekly church news newsletter The Critical Friend: https://tswyatt.com • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

Tim is still away so this week we're bringing you a classic episode from 2024 where we interview the influential writer Andy Crouch on a question which was everywhere that year and is only become more pressing since: are smartphones damaging our children? A growing number of writers and thinkers are arguing that our digital technology, most notably social media and smartphones, are responsible for rocketing rates of mental illness and epidemics of bullying among young people. Andy has written three recent books exploring how Christian families can put in place good habits around tech and screens, and explains his convictions around how to keep tech in its proper place. How can we ensure the key formational environments of home, school and church are centred around spiritually healthy interpersonal relationships and not lost to endless scrolling? Or is a radical neo-Luddism both unattainable and needlessly ostracising for our children? • You can send in your questions for us to discuss on the podcast, or ideas for future episodes, to [email protected] • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com • Find some of Tim's journalism and sign up for free to his weekly church news newsletter The Critical Friend: https://tswyatt.com • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

Tim’s on holiday this week, so here’s an episode from the MOLAD archive we hope you will enjoy. Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness.”’ These famous words from the first chapter of Genesis are the touchstone of the theology of the image of God, or Imago Dei. Christians throw this reference out a lot, but we’re often a bit unclear about it really means to say humans are made in the image of God. Is it about certain things we can do that God also does? Is it about what God is calling us towards as humans? Is it about how our relationships? How can we come up with a definition which does not exclude the disabled, children, or the elderly? It’s worth dwelling on, as the image of God and how we define human distinctiveness as believers is critically important in an era when human uniqueness is under attack from many directions. From artificial intelligence to abortion, the question of personhood and recognising and protecting the humanity of others is something we all have to wrestle with, and getting our foundations right on the image of God is a good place to start. • You can send in your questions for us to discuss on the podcast, or ideas for future episodes, to [email protected] • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com • Find some of Tim's journalism and sign up for free to his weekly church news newsletter The Critical Friend: https://tswyatt.com • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

Sam Tranter, an Oxford researcher in political theology and emerging technologies. He unpacks the Pope’s new encyclical on AI, its roots in Catholic social teaching, and whether the Vatican can influence tech culture. Conversations cover human dignity, technology’s non-neutrality, Vatican–Silicon Valley ties, and practical recommendations for shaping AI in society.

A wide look at how Western hunger for high tech medicine can harm low‑resource health systems and skew priorities. They probe why shiny treatments get funding while basic prevention and workforce pay are neglected. The conversation links political pressure, corruption and brain drain to global health injustice. It asks whether relentless pursuit of longevity can become an idol that undermines the common good.