Episodes
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Author Shankari Chandran believes storytelling may be our most powerful weapon in the search for hope, truth, empathy and justice.
Shankari is a Sri Lankan Thamil Australian author. Her third novel Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens won Australia’s most prestigious literary award, the Miles Franklin, last year. In this interview with Life & Faith, Shankari shares her story, her inspirations and the power of storytelling as a carrier of hope, an antidote to injustice and a catalyst for empathy.
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Explore:
Shankari’s website
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Research uncovers the secrets to thriving as individuals and communities.
What are the ingredients of a life that will help us to thrive as people? How do we go about cultivating those ingredients? What does it mean to truly flourish as a person?
Policy makers are interested in these questions. So are educationalists. And as individuals it’s a topic that we increasingly seek answers to. People these days are very focused on wellbeing and what will aid or hinder that.
Tyler VanderWeele’s research in this area engages huge data sets and deep analysis. He is Professor of Epidemiology in the Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Director of the Human Flourishing Program.
Professor VanderWeele’s many insights into what makes for human flourishing are worth hearing. Some might come as a surprise!
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Missing episodes?
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In a money-hungry world that's focused on profits, ethical impact investing seeks to re-introduce compassion and benevolence to our system of buying, selling and money-making.
Sam Richards is the Managing Director of Brightlight, an investment firm that seeks to do more than simply make money. Brightlight - along with a growing number of family offices and individual investors - seeks to use financial markets to improve social and environmental outcomes for real people in real communities. In this interview with Life & Faith, Sam offers us a glimpse into the world of ethical investing - its motivations, its challenges, its inner workings and its growing impact.
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Explore:
Brightlight website CPX Podcast Episode: The Ethics of What We Eat Adam Smith’s ‘Theory of Moral Sentiments’
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Life & Faith producer, Allan Dowthwaite, takes over the studio to mark 500 episodes of amazing conversations.
Allan Dowthwaite, CPX’s media director, normally runs the recording studio for the team. But in this special episode, marking twelve-and-a-half years of the podcast, he’s commandeered the mic as your personal guide to Life & Faith’s greatest conversations, organised into the following categories for your listening pleasure.
Links are included to any episode you want to listen to in full.
The cultural waters in which we swim, featuring Sydney Morning Herald Economics Editor Ross Gittins, political scientist Dale Kuehne, New York Times film writer Alissa Wilkinson, cultural critic Andy Crouch, and author Tim Winton.How Christianity explains our world, featuring cold case detective Jim Warner Wallace, author Marilynne Robinson, author Francis Spufford, and historian Tom Holland.Surprising stories, featuring Oxford mathematician John Lennox, Alex Gaffikin, who wintered on Antarctica for two years, Johnnie Walker, beloved authority on the Camino de Santiago, and the late scholar of African-American religion, Albert J. Raboteau.Indigenous Australians, featuring Yorta Yorta man William Cooper, Torres Strait Islander leader and pastor Gabriel Bani, and Aunty Maureen Atkinson, member of the Stolen Generation.Changing one’s mind about faith, featuring ABC Religion & Ethics editor Scott Stephens and author Susannah McFarlane.Ordinary people, extraordinary acts, featuring Australian nurse Valerie... -
On the 24th anniversary of the Sydney Olympic Games, we look back at what made those games so special. Simon Smart and Mark Stephens ask what these kinds of events can tell us about who we are as human beings.
Former Olympics Minister Bruce Baird talks us through the hair-raising bid process and the joy of seeing the whole thing come together so well. Veteran sportswriter Greg Baum outlines what he found so special about Sydney 2000. And seven-time Paralympian Liesl Tesch recalls the buzz of playing in front of packed houses cheering the home team on, and what this event did for Paralympians generally. And Simon Smart gets all nostalgic remembering his experiences going to anything he could get tickets for.
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Reconstructive surgeon Tertius Venter tells Life & Faith how his life changed forever when he saw how much he could impact the lives of desperate people.
Dr Venter is a plastic and reconstructive surgeon who spends 8 months of every year volunteering his time to two charities helping the poorest people on the planet get surgery they’d have no hope of getting were it not for people like him.
Over 20 years ago Tertius went on a mission to The Gambia in West Africa where a hospital ship was providing medical care to extremely poor people. His surgical skills were needed and completely altered the prospects of those coming for help.
He returned home a different person, so animated by both the incredible need that he saw, but also the difference he was able to make in people’s lives.
Since then his life has been dedicated to providing relief to suffering and poor people whose lives are very often completely changed by what Tertius and his team are able to offer them.
Tertius’s Christian faith drives him on through challenging and sometimes heartbreaking situations, and he says he never feels closer to God than when he is doing this work.
His is a challenging and immensely inspiring story.
Explore:
Mercy Ships where you can support the organisation or even Tertius directly
Cure international
Dr Venter’s Website
Operation Smile
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Trevor Cooling explains how educating the whole person lays foundations for the ‘life worth living’.
Professor Trevor Cooling has spent a life time in education, in universities and also public and independent schools. Here he talks to Life & Faith about why teaching worldview is a crucial skill students need to learn as they engage in a pluralistic society.
We discuss the true purpose of education, the lessons that are life-long and where religious education fits, even in a culture that has been moving away from institutionalised faith. Trevor also explains why vocation and a sense of calling can be such a gift for a student finding their way in the world.
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What vision of a full and flourishing life can we offer the young men in our lives?
Justine Toh interviews Simon Smart about his new book The End of Men? Simon wrote this book after observing that boys and men are struggling in many ways—socially, emotionally, and at school. Boys are finding it difficult to understand their place, and wondering if there is something inherently toxic about their masculinity. Simon explores a more holistic understanding of what it means to be a man, and the importance of harnessing a tender masculinity for the common good. Boys need good examples of men to lead them into a healthy expression of their masculinity, to encourage them to use their strengths to benefit others and to protect the vulnerable: to operate with a “lens of love”.
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Get the Book: The End of Men?
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The ex-Rolling Stones journalist throws open the door the devil hides behind. Warning: not for kids.
The devil’s best trick, according to French poet Charles Baudelaire and/or criminal mastermind Keyser Soze in The Usual Suspects (1995) was convincing the world that he didn’t exist.
Randall Sullivan’s new book, The Devil’s Best Trick: How the Face of Evil Disappeared, argues that despite our sceptical age that dismisses the existence of the supernatural, evil is at work in the world, and can’t be dismissed as the product of a bad upbringing or warped psychology.
In this interview with Life & Faith, Sullivan, the author and former investigative reporter for Rolling Stone magazine, tells us about his miraculous conversion experience, recounted in his earlier book The Miracle Detective: An Investigation of Holy Visions.
He also spills on his new book, which took him 20 years to write, and his experience of coming up, close, and personal with the divine... and what felt like a malevolent presence in the Piazza Navona in Rome.
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Explore:
The Devil’s Best Trick: How the Face of Evil Disappeared
The Miracle Detective: An Investigation into Holy Visions
Randall Sullivan’s Wired article on Michelle Gomez, the world’s best bounty hunter (paywalled)
A short Thinking out Loud column quoting Randall Sullivan in the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in 2024
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With despair on the rise and hope in short supply, children’s literature offers people of all ages a treasure trove of wisdom.
Dr Amanda B Vernon is a literature expert who believes that children's stories are not just for children. In this interview with Life & Faith, Amanda talks about how stories written with children in mind often shed light on deep human needs, including our longing for justice, agency, truth, wonder and redemption through suffering. From Alice in Wonderland to Harry Potter to Winnie the Pooh, Amanda explores the joy, the wonder and the enduring wisdom of children’s literature.
Explore:
Amanda B Vernon’s website: www.amandabvernon.com
George Macdonald’s, ‘The Fantastic Imagination’
Neda Ulaby's NPR article on "protopias"
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Darrell Bock fears the church in the U.S. is in danger of losing its distinctiveness. How might it recover?
The United States is a divided country, and this year’s presidential election will bring that into sharp focus. Darrell Bock is a New Testament Scholar at Dallas Theological Seminary and the Executive Director of Cultural Engagement at the Hendricks Center.
Life & Faith interviews Darrell about the divisions in the U.S. and how tribal and ideological they have become. Darrell is concerned that the church has increased this polarisation with its misplaced loyalties, and by creating a social atmosphere that does not deal well with difference. Darrell believes it has been a mistake for the church to become an extension of a political arm, and that younger people have left the church in droves as a result.
Darrell sees a great need to return to a sense of welcome and care for the marginalised, as a distinctive marker of the love of God.
Explore:
The Hendricks Center
Darrell Bock books (there are many)
Breaking the Da Vinci Code: Answers to the Questions Everyone’s Asking Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture’s Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ Gospel of Luke Commentary
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The spirit of our politics feels negative and harmful. Michael Wear believes the improved spiritual health and civic character of individuals can change that.
“We belong to a political party because we believe things, we should not believe things because we belong to a political party”.
Michael Wear is the author of The Spirit of Our Politics: Spiritual Formation and the Renovation of Public Life. In this episode he talks to Life & Faith about his desire to cultivate a more healthy and vibrant political and civic life in his country that is wracked with polarisation and enmity across the political spectrum.
Wear is under no illusions as to how large a challenge that is but remains committed to making a contribution towards a healthy pluralism.
He also has huge reservations about the way in which faith has been captured to further political, rather than religious, outcomes. Wear think there is huge danger in Christianity being instrumentalised as a means of advancing one set of political ideas. Instead, faith should be about the flourishing of all society.
Explore:
Michael Wear’s latest book The Spirit of Our Politics: Spiritual Formation and the Renovation of Public Life.
Michael’s previous book Reclaiming Hope: Lessons Learned in the Obama Whitehouse About the Future of Faith in America.
The Centre for Christianity and Public Life
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The headlines are grim, and the world feels apocalyptic. It’s time to become the people the world needs right now.
“I don't know how to fix climate change or geopolitics, but I know what I'm called to do, which is put my roots down deep into love and be growing up, be becoming the kind of person that the world needs.”
Elizabeth Oldfield is the author of the book Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times – and turbulent our times are. Climate anxiety, political polarisation, social unrest, and diminishing attention spans haunt our days. Also present, but perhaps less obviously so: our gnawing spiritual hunger and desire for connection with ourselves, each other, and maybe even what Elizabeth calls “the G bomb”: God.
In this interview with Life & Faith, Elizabeth talks about “steadiness of soul” in an increasingly chaotic world and what it means to live in a small, intentional community or “micro monastery” that can fit 18 people around the dinner table. The conversation also covers how Elizabeth has managed to cultivate a space for profound chats across social divides in the podcast The Sacred, and what it meant for Elizabeth to flout careerist dogma and quit her stable, secure job to rest and lean into a different way of life.
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Explore:
Elizabeth Oldfield’s book Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times
Her letter about leaving her job that hit a nerve with people
Her Substack newsletter Fully Alive
The Sacred Podcast
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A philosopher and a butcher dig into what we should and shouldn’t eat, and why.
“As society has shifted away from being in close proximity to farms and food production, people are increasingly concerned about where their food’s coming from – the condition under which animals are raised and reared, and certain farming practices, [such as] pesticide use and the effects that that may have on the environment as well as on human health.”
Philosopher and sociologist Chris Mayes has thought about eating a lot more than most of us (which if we’re honest, is already quite a bit). The ethics of food involves a whole raft of factors: not only the treatment of animals and the environmental impact of production, but also the treatment of workers and the impact of the growth of pastoral land on indigenous peoples.
“In Australia it seems natural that we would have sheep, and natural that wheat would be here, but in thinking of the obviousness of those practices and products here, we forget their role in dispossessing indigenous Australians – the way that the expansion of sheep, particularly throughout NSW and Victoria in the early to mid-nineteenth century, was coinciding with a lot of these most brutal massacres.”
Chris considers what it means for lamb to be Australia’s national cuisine – and how you make Scriptures that rely on the language of sheep and shepherds meaningful within a non-pastoralist culture.
Then: Tom Kaiser is Simon Smart’s local butcher. Perhaps unusually for a butcher, he thinks people should eat less meat. He sells meat products that many would consider to be expensive in what he calls the “Masterchef era”.
“Affluence definitely plays a big part. They can afford to have the product that they see on TV. We know for a fact that we wouldn’t be able to charge the price, nor have the same model we have in different parts of Australia. … Ethics is obviously multi-layered. It comes to personal beliefs. It comes down to knowledge.”
Explore:
Chris Mayes’ book Unsettling Food Politics: Agriculture, Dispossession and Sovereignty in Australia
CPX’s new podcast The Week @ CPX
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The astonishing technological progress humans have made sometimes raises the warning that we shouldn’t be “playing God”. Nick Spencer from Theos think tank disagrees.
In their book Playing God: science, religion, and the future of humanity, Nick Spencer and Hannah Waite insist that contrary to the warnings to avoid “playing God”, human beings are in fact a God-playing species and have a responsibility to ‘play God’ well.
They examine remarkable advancements we have made in technological capability—AI, pharmacology and genetic engineering, knowledge of outer space, genetic editing, healing in the womb—and note that the world that science is creating raises exactly the kind of questions that science can’t answer. Their book is a plea to maintain an open and multi-voiced language to address these questions drawing on ethical, humanistic and spiritual layers.
On Life & Faith this week Nick Spencer joined Simon Smart to delve into some urgent contemporary questions that all coalesce around the notion of who we are as humans.
Explore
Nick Spencer and Hannah Waite, Playing God: Science, Religion and the Future of Humanity
Theos Think Tank
Centre for Public Christianity
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Bill Bennett, director of the film The Way, My Way and Camino legend Johnnie Walker Santiago reflect on the spiritual riches of going on pilgrimage.
“I see this walk as an 800km long cathedral”. So says Australian filmmaker Bill Bennett in the film The Way, My Way, which depicts Bill’s experiences walking the Camino de Santiago.
The Camino de Santiago, or the Way of St James, is a network of pilgrimage roads and paths running through Spain, France, and Portugal, leading to the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela in Galicia in north-western Spain, long believed to be the burial place of the Apostle James.
The Camino has been an oft-travelled pilgrimage route since medieval times. These days, plenty of spiritual seekers like Bill, and others looking for connection and adventure, become modern-day pilgrims, driven to discover deeper truths about life along the way.
This episode of Life & Faith interviews Bill Bennett, the director of The Way, My Way as well as Johnnie Walker Santiago, a beloved expert and authority on the Camino de Santiago.
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Explore:
Trailer for The Way, My Way
The book Bill Bennett wrote, upon which the film is based: The Way, My Way: A Camino memoir
Johnnie Walker Santiago’s guidebooks: Camino to Santiago: A spiritual companion and It’s About Time: A call to the Camino de Santiago
Check out CPX's new podcast, The Week @ CPX
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This dreaded disease seems to strip away everything that makes us, well, us. A chaplain and a psychiatrist remind us of the human at the centre of the diagnosis.
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The ‘d’ word – dementia – is one that everyone fears. It seems to strip away everything that made that person with the disease the person we once knew. It’s easy to lose sight of the person, the human at the centre of the diagnosis.
Today, 420,000 Australians live with dementia, a number projected to double in the next 30 years, which makes it a significant and growing health challenge for Australia’s ageing population.
This episode of Life & Faith brings you two conversations that bring the human at the centre of the dementia diagnosis back into focus. We’re featuring two interviews Natasha Moore did before going on maternity leave: with Neil Jeyasingam, Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Sydney. Neil is also a CPX Associate.
Natasha also spoke to Ben Boland, a chaplain with 15 years’ experience in residential aged care – and whose father lives with dementia.
Explore:
Dementia Australia, the national peak body representing people with dementia, their families, and carers.
Check out CPX's new podcast, The Week At CPX, to keep up-to-date with everything that’s happening at CPX, plus a bit of commentary on the side.
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Mercy Aiken tells Life & Faith of the joy-filled, yet painful life of Palestinian Christian, Bishara Awad.
Bishara was a child in Jerusalem when his father was shot and killed during the Israeli-Arab war of 1948. The story of his life and that of his family provides a sobering portrait of life in Israel/Palestine during decades of war, violence, tension and dashed dreams for those seeking a peaceful resolution to conflict.
Somehow, Bishara, a Palestinian Christian and community leader, remains unbowed, but also forgiving and empathetic towards his opponents.
His story is told in the book, Yet in the Dark Streets Shining – a Palestinian Story of Hope and Resilience in Bethlehem.
The coauthor of the book is Mercy Aiken – who came into the CPX studio. Mercy was in Australia with the Palestine Israel Ecumenical Network.
The book:
Yet in the Dark Streets Shining – a Palestinian Story of Hope and Resilience in Bethlehem
Palestine Israel Ecumenical Network
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Asuntha Charles has lived in some toughest places in the world. And she’s loved it.
Long
As a young woman, Asuntha Charles stubbornly defied her culture to advocate for vulnerable women and girls. That determination never left her as she dedicated her life to voiceless people in not only her native India, but places like Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Sudan and Iraq.
Here she tells Life & Faith about her extraordinary life of service and care for people who needed that care most. And we also get an insight into the early influences that shaped her life and contributed to her holding a faith that sustains her even in the face of risk, and heartbreaking losses.
Try listening to this and not be challenged and inspired!
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War correspondent Janine di Giovanni has covered the near-extinction of the ancient Christian communities of the Middle East.
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“They’ve survived plagues, they’ve survived pillages, they’ve survived raids, they’ve survived purges – and they most recently survived ISIS.”
The Christian communities of the Middle East – in places like Iraq and Syria, Egypt and Palestine – are ancient, and over recent decades have been facing various kinds of existential threat. Janine di Giovanni’s book The Vanishing: The Twilight of Christianity in the Middle East is a work of “pre-archaeology”, recording the stories and courage of these communities even as they disappear.
Di Giovanni is a war correspondent and human rights investigator who has covered 18 wars and 3 genocides across her career, bearing witness to the terrible things that happen in our world. In this episode, she talks about visiting churches in war zones, why people stay, and whether faith – including her own belief in God – is strong enough to survive war. She also shares a bit about her current work with The Reckoning Project, a war crimes unit working within Ukraine.
“It's been an honour to work for 35 years in all these war zones with these extraordinary people. I feel very privileged and lucky every day of my life that I do this work, because … I have a purposeful life.”
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EXPLORE:
The Vanishing: The Twilight of Christianity in the Middle East, by Janine di Giovanni
The Reckoning Project
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