Two years on an Antarctic research station taught Alex Gaffikin about iso long before lockdown. 

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When Alex Gaffikin was 22, she took a nine week voyage from South London, where she grew up, to the Halley Research Station on Brunt Ice Shelf in Antarctica. She ‘wintered’ there for two years as a meteorologist.  

In this interview, she gives us an insight into daily life on the south pole, the pressures and joys of living alongside other winterers, and her dark night of the soul experience during which she experienced a crisis of faith. 

Still, there were other consolations: like visiting a colony of emperor penguins, and waking up in the middle of the night to see the southern lights and the Milky Way with no light pollution nearby to obscure her glimpse of the galaxy.  

Listen in to what Alex experienced on Antarctica, and gain insight into what she learnt about isolation, long before lockdown, and the concrete difference it made for her to live out her faith by loving her neighbour.

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Explore: 

A short article giving us a further glimpse into Alex’s daily life on Antarctica

Darrell Bock talks about the things that pushed him, as a young man, to ask deep questions about life and meaning. And where he found answers.   

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Darrell Bock is a world-renowned Biblical scholar with a keen eye on the cultural water we swim in. He’s also an incurable sports fan.  

In this interview he talks to Simon Smart about the impact of losing his parents at a young age and where that took him in his search for meaning and purpose. Darrell discusses his life and career what what he thinks leads to lasting satisfaction. What is surprising about the Bible? What is its essential message? What does it have to say to a person in the 21st Century? 

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Explore: 

Some of Darrell’s books 

• Cultural Intelligence: Living for God in a Diverse, Pluralistic World 
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• Studying the Historical Jesus 
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• How would Jesus vote? 
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The Hendricks Center at Dallas Theological Seminary

We’re languishing (still!) after two years of the pandemic. Can a burnout psychologist help? 

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Feeling a bit blah mid-way through 2022… still? 

In 2021, organisational psychologist Adam Grant named that pandemic feeling. He called it “languishing” and described it as “the absence of well-being”. 

“You’re not functioning at full capacity. Languishing dulls your motivation, disrupts your ability to focus, and triples the odds that you’ll cut back on work,” he wrote in the New York Times. 

In this episode of Life & Faith, we call it something else: pandemic fatigue. Or just “not coping”. Natasha gives us her take on “not coping” being the new “busy” - in other words, the standard reply to the question “how are you?”. And she tells us how potatoes relate to pandemic fatigue. 

We also ask clinical psychologist Dr Valerie Ling how exhaustion and burnout relate to all of the above. For even if these conditions go by different names, they all seem to describe similar things.  

It’s enough to make you want to throw your hands in the air and go, “Potato, potahto, tomato, tomahto, let’s call the whole thing off”.  

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Explore: 

Natasha’s piece on “not coping” 

Adam Grant’s article that named the blah we feel 

Dr Ling’s ebook My Burnout Prevention Plan: From a psychologist who knows the cost of burnout 

The Centre for Effective Living 

Our episode on burnout with Jonathan Malesic

Philosopher and theologian John Milbank on left vs right, Harry Potter, and how none of us behave like we’re just atoms.

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If you’re wanting a crash course on “isms” like liberalism, secularism, and populism from anyone, it’s John Milbank.

In this wide-ranging conversation with Simon Smart, the philosopher and theologian has a way of never saying quite what you expect him to. He questions the idea that left and right are really in opposition to each other, calls the final Harry Potter book “a profound theological meditation”, and is enthusiastic about people’s longing for paganism.

What does he think Christianity might give people that’s surprising? “Pleasure,” he replies immediately. “It would make their lives far more interesting, exciting, and pleasurable - and physical, because they’re essentially alienated from their bodies if they think their bodies are just bits of matter.”

Does he think a revival of religion is on the cards? “The reason I do think religion may revive is that it is on the side of common sense … all the time people behave as if they had minds, as if they had souls, as if the good, the true, and the beautiful, the right and wrong, were real - and yet the scientific discourses which we have, or rather their scientistic reductive modes, can’t really allow the reality of any of these things.”

From politics to angels, Milbank turns his formidable intellect on some of the quirks and contradictions of our time.

Simon, Justine, and Natasha debrief on their fave reads/watches of 2022 thus far.

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The CPX team - no surprises here - love a good book or film, and also love a good gossip about them afterwards. 

Join Simon Smart, Justine Toh, and Natasha Moore as they gush about what they’ve seen and heard of late. 

Natasha repents of her snobbery about audiobooks, having been converted to the form by Trevor Noah’s remarkable memoir Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood. 

Justine makes the case for her claim (less than halfway through the year) that the fantasy/sci-fi film Everything Everywhere All At Once is the best film of 2022. 

And Simon is super impressed by Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel Crossroads - especially by his depiction of people of faith, in the context of a pastor’s family in 1970s Illinois. 

Race, faith, family, the multiverse, and struggling through hard times: some themes emerge as the team consider their recent cultural consumption, and try to persuade you to watch or listen as well. 

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Explore:

Listen to Trevor Noah’s memoir Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

Watch the Everything Everywhere All at Once trailer

Read Jonathan Franzen’s novel Crossroads

Watch Trevor Noah’s monologue about Kim Kardashian and Kanye

Listen to the Radio National interview with Jonathan Franzen

It’s been 50 years since the Watergate scandal. Our trust in institutions has never quite recovered.

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On June 17, 1972, police arrested a group of burglars at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. Evidence linked the attempted burglary to US President Nixon’s campaign for re-election – leading to a Senate investigation that ultimately led to Nixon’s resignation.

Since then, the suffix ‘gate’ has been attached to any scandal (political or otherwise), story of mismanagement and abuse, or suggestion of a cover-up. The net effect has been to dissolve people’s trust that they’re being told the truth. 

Half a century on, we live in societies of chronic distrust, as measured by annual polls like the Edelman Trust Barometer, and research conducted by organisations like More in Common, which studies polarisation and political division across the West.

In this episode of Life & Faith, we revisit the main beats of the Watergate scandal and its reverberations in our culture – and popular culture. We also explore what it means for our societies when distrust has become a way of life, and the role of local communities - including, surprisingly, communities of faith - in nurturing trust between people. 

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Explore:

Garrett M. Graff’s Watergate: A New History

More in Common’s 2021 research report Two Stories of Distrust in America

Edelman Trust Barometer 2022 

What our favourite companion animals can teach us about ourselves – and about God. 

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Are you a dog person or cat lover? You’re one or the other, apparently. 

Wth 69% of Australian households now owning a pet, according to a 2021 survey by Animal Medicines Australia, this week Life & Faith is pleased to get controversial: we reveal that Australia’s “two-pet” system has a clear winner. Dogs.

We speak to Barney Zwartz, long-time dog tragic, about the dogs in his life: the border collie-labrador cross Nessie, whom Barney dubs “Mary Poppins” because she is “practically perfect in every way”, and Lennie, a border collie-whippet who had a special connection with Barney’s late son Sam. 

What explains the human-dog bond? Is it dogs’ “hypersociability”? Or “exaggerated gregariousness”? Professor Clive Wynne, the founder of the Canine Science Laboratory at Arizona State University, just calls it dogs’ capacity for “love”. 

Barney draws on Professor Wynne’s Dog is Love: Why and how your dog loves you when discussing his own immensely popular columns in The Age reflecting on how heaven-sent dogs seem to be, given their loving, forgiving natures. But don’t worry, cat people: Justine demands Barney account for his outrageous quip in one of those columns that “cats, of course, are despatched from below”. 

Meanwhile, we borrow a snippet from Nick Spencer’s interview with philosopher John Gray about his book Feline Philosophy: Cats and the meaning of life. In this extract from the podcast Reading Our Times, John Gray ponders what cats reveal about the problem of human consciousness: we worry endlessly, while they don’t really seem bothered by anything.

So if you, a human animal, are weighed down by many cares, we hope this lighthearted look at what our pets can teach us about God, or what it means to be human, is as fun as a dog with a bone, or a cat toying with a mouse. Enjoy.

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Explore:

Barney’s columns about Lennie and Sam and Nessie (pictures included!)

Nick Spencer’s interview with John Gray about Feline Philosophy from the podcast Reading Our Times

Clive Wynne’s book Dog is Love: Why and how your dog loves you

John Gray’s book Feline Philosophy: Cats and the meaning of life

Benjamin and Jenna Silber Storey’s book Why We Are Restless: On the modern quest for contentment 

For centuries, all kinds of people have testified that Dante and his epic poem changed their life. 

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Midway along the journey of our life

I woke to find myself in a dark wood,

for I had wandered off from the straight path.

A 700-year-old epic poem may not be the first place you’d think to turn when life gets messy, painful, or confusing. But across times, cultures, and different walks of life, people say that reading The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri changed - or even saved! - their life. What is it that they find in this strange old book? 

In this episode of Life & Faith, Simon and Natasha hear from a scholar and also a few recent - and enthusiastic - readers of Dante about what this story of one man’s imagined journey through the afterlife (hell, purgatory, paradise) has meant to them. 

“Dante finds us in hard times,” says Professor Jane Kim from Biola University, who found herself returning to the poem during the peak of the pandemic. “I think for those of us who may be experiencing the proverbial midlife crisis or who may be feeling lost or stranded, Dante is reminding us that the midway point is the beginning of the epic, the middle is always the beginning of a new adventure.”

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Explore: One Hundred Days of Dante

Sexuality, consent and pornography might not be the first topic of conversation we’d raise at a dinner party. But perhaps we should! 

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Issues around consent, pornography and sexuality are a minefield to navigate for young people today and sometimes it’s hard to find helpful places to go to find help.

Daniel Principe, Youth Advocate and Educator at Collective Shout, is one source of information and encouragement for young people and his work is hitting a nerve.

What are ways to help young women and men flourish together when pornography and objectification are such powerfully warping influences and so hard to counteract. Daniel Principe is out in schools offering a different way to think and to be, and young people are lapping this message up. 

Listen to Dan tell something of his story, his passion for the subject and why he thinks there are things that can be done to help people find healthy and life-giving relationships that will serve both individuals and the common good.   

Despite the darkness of the subject matter, this is an uplifting and optimistic conversation.

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www.collectiveshout.org

Last of the Romans: Reimagining Masculinity, restoring virtue 

1800 Respect or 1800 737 732

Men’s Referral Service or 1300 766 491

Lifeline or 13 11 14

Steph Judd was a healthy, sporty and musical teenager when, unexpectedly, things that she could, up until then, do naturally and easily, suddenly became physically difficult, and then, eventually, impossible.

Steph has now had about 15 years to process a significant physical change and adjust to living with a disability. But she has learned plenty of things about herself and picked up some wisdom along the way. Her thinking and writing on the topic of our limitations offers a counter-cultural approach to engaging not with our “potential” but the things that limit us. 

Steph believes there is something vital about coming to terms with those limitations and hence our humanity. In wrestling with her own limits, and accepting her vulnerability, Steph has found she has been opened up to relationship, community and a connectedness that might otherwise have eluded her.

This is an honest, refreshing and challenging conversation that cuts against the grain of our culture’s obsession with “maximising” our potential and shrugging off human limits.

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Read Steph on “The Gifts of Our Limitations”

Steph writes about Dignity in Aged Care

Listen to Steph’s Lecture for ADM on The Dignity of Our Limits