God Forbid

Mother Earth. Mother Mary. The "good mother." Is there a more impossible standard than motherhood itself?

Every culture seems to believe in a mother who is endless. Endlessly patient, endlessly giving, endlessly present. 

In Christianity she's Mary, the sinless virgin, the giving and eternal mother of the church. 

In psychology she's the "Good Mother", always available and calm, never faltering. 

In real life, she's the woman who looks like she's got motherhood handled, but who, if you asked her, would tell you she falls short like everyone else. 

Where does that ideal come from? What does it cost the women who try to live up to it? 

And what does it cost the women who, by choice or by circumstance, never become the good mother at all?

GUESTS:

• Cristina Lledo Gomez Senior Lecturer in Catholic Systematic Theology at BBI – The Australian Institute of Theological Education. Author The Church as Woman and Mother
• Dr Bronwyn Harman Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Edith Cowan University where she researches Australian motherhood and the "Good Mother Syndrome"
• Sheree Joseph Sydney writer, Author of the new memoir Juicy 

Your phone will tell you the time, and that number has an extraordinary history. 

And hasn't always been there. 

Time used to be whatever the church bell said it was. 

Time was rung, sung and prayed. It belonged to God. 

Then we put time in a box on the wall. Then on our wrist. Now in our pocket and on our satellites. 

Yet – there’s no expert consensus on whether time even flows from past present to future. 

GUESTS:

• Kristie Miller is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney and co-director of the Centre for Time, and author of Out of Time and Does Tomorrow Exist?
• Matthew Champion is Associate Professor of History at the University of Melbourne and author of The Fullness of Time: Temporalities of the Fifteenth-Century Low Countries 

This program was recorded on the lands of the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation

Its the third in our History Of... series

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Every civilisation that's ever existed has asked the same question: what's actually real?  

Plato made the point that it's more than we can see with our own eyes. 

Then came Newton, and reality became a clock with time. 

Then came Einstein, and time started to bend. Then came quantum mechanics — and reality gets stranger still!

Two astrophysicists go back to the beginning of humanity to ask "what did humans even mean by "real", before anyone had the maths to check?" 

And is there a creator behind it all?

GUESTS:

• Geraint Lewis, Professor of astrophysics at the University of Sydney, has spent his career hunting dark energy and dark matter — and doesn't believe in a God at the end of it. His new book is The Shortest History of Reality.
• His old friend and former student – now astrophysicist himself at Western Sydney University is Dr Luke Barnes, who works on the very same equations — and continues to believe it points to a creator. 

If you hit your finger with a hammer, would you feel it the same way a medieval carpenter did, doing exactly the same thing? 

Well, apparently not. 

We think of our feelings as the most private and immediate things we own. 

Hit your thumb, and YOU know pain when YOU feel it.  

But historians of emotion say that's a modern conceit. Pain, grief, love, loneliness — none of them are fixed.  

They're made, by religion, by culture and science, and most of all by the stories we tell each other about what a feeling is supposed to be. 

Lets look into the history of feeling itself. 

Were the emotions of the past even the same species of experience as ours? 

GUESTS:

• Professor Katie Barclay is a Future Fellow in the Department of History and Archaeology, and author of Loneliness in World History  and Caritas: Neighbourly Love & the Early Modern Self
• Professor Stephanie Trigg, a Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Melbourne University. Among her near a dozen books is "Weeping Like a Beaten Child: Figurative Language and the Emotions in Chaucer and Malory."
• A/Prof Rob Boddice a historian of science, medicine and the emotions, based at Freie Universitaet Berlin and McGill University, Montreal, is author of Knowing Pain: A History of Sensation, Emotion, and Experience, and Research Fellow at the Uni of Helsinki in Finland.

Is racism about the colour of your skin, the history of colonialism, or the size of your bank account? 

The White House has a cage fight on the Whitehouse front lawn while, somewhere, a father rose at 3am to feed a crying baby.    

In 2026, what does it mean to be a good father, or a good man? 

Does God, or any religious tradition, see men as something distinct? Or is “be a good man” just “be a good person”? 

The manosphere claims religious sanction. Is that a corruption of these traditions, or an expression of them? 

Three fathers, three frameworks. What do you or can you actually hand onto your son?

GUESTS:

• Rev Dr Michael Jensen is an Anglican minister, an Oxford theologian, and a father of four. He’ll tell you God has a design for men — but hear him out, because I reckon it’s not what you’re expecting.
• A/Prof Adis Duderija is a scholar of Islam and gender at Griffith University — an expert on how his own tradition understands the rights and responsibilities of manhood. That too is more nuanced than its given credit for. And a father to two teenagers.
• Zac Seidler is a psychologist who studies what young men actually watch online. He’s professor at Orygen, Australia's Centre of Excellence in Youth Mental Health. And, as of this year, a brand-new dad. 

Do to a dog what we do to a factory-farmed pig, and you’d be arrested. 

Do it to ten thousand pigs in a shed, and it’s breakfast. 

Most of us say cruelty to animals is wrong. 

And then most of us are happy to have them killed and eat them. 

Both our panellists think the way we treat animals is a moral catastrophe. 

But they get there by opposite roads. One says animals matter because they suffer. The other says they matter because they’re God’s creatures. 

GUESTS:

Peter Singer

Emeritus Professor of Bioethics, Princeton University. Host of the podcast Lives Well Lived. 50 years ago exactly, his book Animal Liberation launched the modern animal liberation movement as we know it.

David Clough

Professor of Theology and Applied Sciences, University of Aberdeen. Author of the two-volume work On Animals. He’s a Methodist Preacher and Co-founder of CreatureKind which aims to transform Christian attitudes and practices toward animals. 

We are, it turns out, a species that refuses to believe its own birth certificate. 

Australia is ageing, fast. This is not new here, or in Europe and North America where the trend has existed for decades. 

But even in China and now India, the fertility rate has dropped below replacement levels – even the two most populous nations on earth are getting older.  

Yet we’ve built a world — our economies, our cities, our pension systems, our cultures — around the young and the productive. So, what happens when that's no longer who we are? 

GUESTS:

Prof Paul Komesaroff is a philosopher at Monash University. And a practising endocrinologist. And Director of the Centre for Ethics in Medicine and Society.  

Dr Lee-Fay Low is Professor in Ageing and Health at University of Sydney. She’s also a registered psychologist and chairs the Sydney Dementia Network. 

You heard that someone had come unstuck. A rival. A bully. Someone overconfident, or two-faced, or just a bit too pleased with themselves. And something in you was glad. 

You won't say it out loud. You might barely admit it to yourself. 

But the Germans have a word for it. And it turns out, so did the ancient Greeks. 

Schadenfreude. The pleasure we take in others' misfortune. 

Is it a moral failing? A sign of deficient character? Or is it a window into what we actually believe about justice, equality — and each other?

GUESTS:

Tiffany Watt-Smith is a cultural historian and author of Schadenfreude: The Joy of Another's Misfortune. She joins us from London. 

Nick Haslam is Professor of Psychology at the University of Melbourne, and the man who's been thinking hard about Australia's national variant — tall poppy syndrome.

Whether or not you believe in - or even know about "the Rapture", "the Tribulation", "the End Times", and "Armageddon", your life is influenced by the idea that Jesus Christ will not only return, he’ll go to Jerusalem, and from there, for exactly one thousand years, he’ll rule the world. 

Yet, this concept is not in the Bible...at least not directly. 

But a bible, published in America in 1909, and written by an American made it the most influential concepts in American Christian fundamentalism.

The story of the Scofield Reference Bible is an extraordinary one. 

Not least because it lies at the heart of Christian Zionism which is more consequential today than ever.  

GUESTS:

• Professor Donald Akenson is from Queen's University in Ontario, his latest book The Americanization of the Apocalypse: Creating America's Own Bible.
• Dr Robyn Whitaker is Associate Professor of New Testament at Melbourne’s University of Divinity – among her titles Revelation for Normal People.