Peter Hartcher joins Life & Faith to discuss his life in journalism and the precarious state of the world.

Peter Hartcher is a leading Australian political and foreign affairs journalist. He has had a long career in the media, beginning with a cadetship at the Sydney Morning Herald fresh out of school in 1982. He is now the Political and International editor for the Herald and for The Age.

He had a couple of stints in Tokyo and Washington and at the Australian Financial Review. He is the author of several books, the latest being, Red Zone: China’s Challenge and Australia’s Future.

He’s won a number of awards for journalism including a Gold Walkley.

Hartcher is known for his incisive commentary, his lively and engaging writing and his careful, sober but hard-hitting style. He hasn’t always been loved by politicians, which is no doubt part of the job description.

In this conversation he talks about his career, the future of journalism, the perilous state of the world and why he won’t give in to despair. 

Explore: Books by Peter Hartcher

To The Bitter End: The Dramatic Story of the Fall of John Howard and the Rise of Kevin Rudd (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin), 2009.

The Sweet Spot: How Australia Made Its Own Luck – And Could Now Throw It All Away (Black Inc.), 2011.

Red Zone: China’s Challenge and Australia’s Future (Black Inc.), 2021

Sheridan Voysey, from Friendship Lab, explains why, in an age of increasing loneliness, the art of cultivating friendship is needed as much as ever before.

When Sheridan Voysey was confronted with the question, “Who can you call at 2am when everything goes wrong?”, he realised that friendship was a facet of his life he had neglected for too long. This set him on a path to consider how we cultivate good friendships, how we can learn the skills required to be a good friend and maintain deep, rich friendships.

He now runs the Friendship Lab, a movement and a course to help adults build the skills to create and sustain healthy friendships. Reflecting on ever-increasing loneliness, Sheridan recognised the need to help people develop skills in collecting more “2am friends”. This is an art you can get better at with the right help. Sheridan says that even those who enjoy great friendships can get better at them.

What are the factors that help grow close friendships? What things get in the way of healthy, long-lasting friendships. How can we be better friends to those we are close to?

Life & Faith delves into all of this with writer, speaker and broadcaster, Sheridan Voysey, along with a couple of groups of people with enduring and interesting friendships. 

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EXPOLRE

Friendship Lab

Sheridan Voysey's website

Niall Williams discusses the conversion of his treasured novel into a major film starring Pierce Brosnan, Helena Bonham Carter and Gabriel Byrne.

Four Letters of Love is the 1997 novel by Irish writer Niall Williams, and has just been adapted, by Williams, into a movie starring Pierce Brosnan, Helena Bonham Carter and Gabriel Byrne.

Life & Faith speaks with Niall Williams about the film and the book. It’s a love story that offers up intriguing and provocative portraits of faith, loss, tragedy, meaning and God.

The story itself engages with human longing, the notion of fate and calling and whether our lives have any pattern or purpose. How do we make sense of the vicissitudes of life? Is there a God behind it all? Can we still believe in miracles?

Niall Williams is an Irish writer of novels, plays and works of non-fiction. Four letters of love was an international best-seller. The film is released July 2025.

Explore

Four Letters of Love trailer

Four Letters of Love novel

Nill Williams website

Julia Verdouw used silence, faith and writing poetry to survive the sudden death of her husband.

Julia is an accomplished academic and policy expert, but her book In the Valley of the Shadow may be her most important work.  Through reflection, poetry and prayers, the book documents her journey of grief.

Regardless of who we are or what we believe, suffering comes for us all. Perhaps the worst kind of suffering is the grief that we face when we lose someone we love. How can we navigate such immense loss and deep sorrow?

In this episode, we explore Julia’s journey of finding comfort, strength, hope, and even redemption, through the deepest suffering.

EXPLORE

Purchase Julia’s book through her website

A columnist’s job is to process deeper currents in news, politics, and culture – all in 800 words.

Who are we as a nation and a people, and what’s going on for us beneath the daily headlines of the 24/7 media cycle?

Few of us stop long enough to wonder – but if we ever wanted to find out, a good place to start would be Sean Kelly’s writing in The Sydney Morning Herald.

Sean Kelly is a former political staffer in the Rudd and Gillard governments, who now writes a weekly column on politics for The Sydney Morning Herald. He’s also the author of the book The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison.

Sean has a front row seat to what’s going on for us as a nation and combines that perspective with an insider’s view of how politics works. In this interview with Life & Faith he considers what it might mean to be considered a chronicler of the national soul. 

Explore 

Sean Kelly’s column on how “kindness” won Anthony Albanese the 2025 Federal election.

His column about what might be called “the Albanese effect”: the move towards the centre, and the adoption of a less divisive tone, in the new leadership of the Greens and Liberal Party.

His book The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison

Stories and stats from the UK suggest that something has shifted, spiritually, over the past few years.

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Since 2018, two million more people in England and Wales have started regularly attending church – an increase fuelled largely by Gen Z, and by young men especially.

So say the results from a new survey conducted by YouGov on behalf of the British and Foreign Bible Society, results which cut across a bunch of our assumptions: that Western societies are on a secularising trajectory; that women are more religious than men; that young people are more likely to reject “traditional” beliefs such as Christianity.

In this episode of Life & Faith, we gather a few reports from abroad to get a handle on what’s happening in the UK, spiritually speaking. Vicar-in-training and Oxford research student Daniel Kim, who has written extensively about spirituality and occult beliefs in contemporary culture, talks about the spiritual openness of Gen Z. Bri Walsh, an Aussie who spent a season in London recently, offers an insider/outsider perspective on UK churchgoing in the 2020s. And Rob Barward-Symmons, co-author of The Quiet Revival – the report that puts concrete numbers to the anecdotal rumblings of the last few years – talks us through the data and what might be driving the recent surge in church attendance.

Explore:

Check out The Quiet Revival report, by Rob Barward-Symmons and Rhiannon McAleer, from British and Foreign Bible Society https://www.biblesociety.org.uk/research/quiet-revival

Read more from Daniel Kim about contemporary spirituality https://www.seenandunseen.com/contributors/daniel-kim

Got a burning creative project? Face your finitude, says this productivity expert, by learning to number your days. 

Everyone is pressed for time, and in a never-ending quest to conquer their schedules. It’s why productivity tips and hacks are big business these days.

But underneath our productivity problem is a reality no one wants to face: the fact that we’re all going to die, argues self-described “recovering” productivity expert Oliver Burkeman, and the author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. The average human life is about 80 years, or some 4000 weeks, and the sooner we come to grips with the ultimate deadline, the better off we’ll be, argues Burkeman.

In this interview with Life & Faith, Oliver explains how “mortality” emerged as a theme for his 2021 book, how the solace of “deep time” – as experienced during times of flow, prayer, meditation, and hiking – connects us with our humanity, how AI might change the game for human creativity, and how he, as someone more drawn to Eastern religion, makes sense of our yearning for more time, for more than one life.

The shadow of Christianity – with its promise of transcendence, eternity, and being situated in an unfolding story that stretches before and after our earthly lives – looms over the conversation.

Explore 

Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals: A Four Week Guide to Doing What Counts

Oliver Burkeman’s website

Journalist, author and theologian, Stan Grant on responding to injustice with grace and love.

In a decades-long career as a journalist and foreign correspondent, Stan Grant saw some of the worst that humanity is capable of. It took its toll on him. And as a Wiradjuri man he has had to wrestle with identity, belonging, and who we all are in 21st century Australia. He went through a period of angst and anger, and he would say, some bitterness, as he and his people confronted injustice, prejudice and a history of oppression, violence and dispossession.

But through a serious spiritual re-awakening, Grant has found a different way to be. On Life & Faith he describes the shape of that spiritual life and the surprising ways it has impacted him and how he sees the world and his place in it. Turning his back on anger, Grant outlines his renewed motivation for meeting hate with love and grace.

His latest book, Murriyang: song of time, is a poetic account of his life and that of his family and his people, and offers a vision of the healing balm of Christian faith that has inspired Grant to see himself, other people and the creation itself, in a new light. Don't miss this confronting and inspiring conversation! 

Explore:

Stan latest book: Murriyang: Song of Time

Lifeline Australia: 13 11 14

Beyond Blue: 1300 22 46 36 or beyondblue.org.au

There are currently 7 living generations. That makes for plenty of crossed-wires, misunderstandings and confusion about each other, and the future.

In this episode of Life & Faith, we speak to futurist, speaker and author Ashley Fell from McCrindle, a social research and advisory firm that uses cutting edge research and data analysis to decode the generations and make sense of each other and even predict the future.

It turns out that there’s much more to each generation than our slang, cultural references or relationship with technology. Join us as we explore how a better understanding of the generations can foster empathy, strengthen social trust and even offer us a window into the future.

Explore:  

McCrindle Research website: https://mccrindle.com.au/ 

What defines a Generation? (video clip): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMB2_aNINdM 

Inside the mind of Generation Alpha:  

https://mccrindle.com.au/article/topic/generation-alpha/inside-the-mind-of-generation-alpha/ 

Welcome Gen Beta (Article): https://mccrindle.com.au/article/generation-beta-defined/

An Anglican priest on Ash Wednesday, a Benedictine nun on Lent, and a Lutheran minister on Bonhoeffer’s last words.

In this episode of Life & Faith, we go beyond the chocolates and hot cross buns to sit with the darkness of the Easter story that unfolds in three acts: dust, desert, and death.

Our guests provide different snapshots of the Easter season, and the unexpected glimmers of life to be found in the time.

From Anglican priest Chris Allan, from St Andrew’s Cathedral in Sydney, we hear about the visceral experience of having the cross marked on your forehead in ash, and why Ash Wednesday is the ultimate reality check about who we are.

Then, Sister Antonia Curtis, from Jamberoo Abbey on NSW’s South Coast, allows us to briefly experience a Desert Day, a time set aside for reflection and contemplation observed by her and her community on Sundays throughout Lent.

Lastly, we dwell on the last words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the pastor, theologian, and unlikely co-conspirator in the Hitler assassination plot. On the eve of his execution by the Nazis in 1945, Bonhoeffer said, “This is the end. But, for me, the beginning of life”. Rev Dr Mark Worthing, a Lutheran minister and Bonhoeffer scholar, explains how the Easter story decodes those words, and how death is transformed into life.

Explore:

Sr Antonia Curtis’ online retreat offered through Jamberoo Abbey: “High Horses, Scapegoats, and Donkeys: A Lenten Odyssey”.

The Adelaide Bonhoeffer Conference 2025, where Rev Dr Mark Worthing is giving a keynote address in late April.