Life & Faith

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

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

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 

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

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.

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 

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 

Sign up for the CPX newsletter here 

CPX writers talk about how they’re hoping to breathe new life into a very old story.  

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Get a glimpse into the CPX writers’ room as Simon, Natasha, Justine and Max talk about what they’re writing about Easter, or how they go about working out how to write about Easter.  

Natasha talks about American novelist Marilynne Robinson’s new book Reading Genesis and how Robinson’s courteous and unapologetic way of doing “public Christianity” messes with how public conversations about God usually happen.  

Max discusses how we may admire heroes for their greatness – like Homer’s Achilles, for example – but we really long for goodness, expressed by saviours who willingly sacrifice themselves for others. 

Simon discusses how a quirk of the calendar can put Anzac Day and Easter in proximity to each other, bringing those two events and their focus on sacrifice into conversation.  

Justine talks about death denial among the tech titans of Silicon Valley who hope to solve the problem of death. She argues that they express what life feels like if Easter Saturday – the day Jesus lay dead in the grave – is never followed by Easter Sunday – the day that changed everything, according to the Christian faith, because it is the day that Jesus rose to new life.  

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Explore: 

Natasha’s piece on Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis 

An article Simon wrote linking Anzac Day with Easter 

Sign up for the CPX newsletter here 

We explore the spiritual needs of people in intensive care in hospital, or behind bars. 

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“I went to see this lady and as soon as I walked in, she actually said, ‘f*** off, I don’t want to have anything to do with you people’.” 

Chaplaincy in Australia is contested. If people have had a bad experience with the church or concerned that someone might be trying to manipulate them, a chaplain walking up to say hi might get that response. Not least because people can be very vulnerable if they’re dealing with a shocking medical episode in hospital or grappling with life in prison. 

This Life & Faith episode takes you behind the scenes of two very different environments: the intensive care unit of a major Sydney hospital, and Kirkconnell Correctional Centre in regional NSW. Two chaplains from Jericho Road, a social service organisation linked with the Presbyterian Church in NSW, tell us about what it’s like to care spiritually for people during very difficult times in their lives.  

Content warning: there are some challenging stories told in these interviews. This episode is not suitable for children. 

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Explore: 

Jericho Road’s Love Your Neighbour course on chaplaincy

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