Soul Search

Greta Gerwig is one of Hollywood’s buzziest directors today. After her smash-hit Barbie, audiences are hotly anticipating her next movie, Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew. But some fans of CS Lewis’ original book are upset that the lion Aslan – a Christ-figure – is being voiced by Meryl Streep.

Critics say associating the Christian God with the feminine is a modern ‘woke’ innovation... but what if it’s not? How do the metaphors we use to talk about God, shape our spiritual beliefs and practices?

Guests

Adrian Drayton is a writer and critic interested in religion on screen, and in the connections between faith and popular culture. Formerly of the Uniting Church magazine Insights, now you can find him on Substack at The Long Conversation.

Rev Dr Sally Douglas is Lecturer of New Testament Studies at Pilgrim Theological College at the University of Divinity and the author of Early Church Understandings of Jesus as the Female Divine. Her latest book is Rewilding Prayer: God Beyond Gender, Faith Beyond Formulas.

More information

• Narnia: Magician’s Nephew official trailer
• Insights Magazine: Greta Gerwig Opens the Door to a Very Different Narnia | Insights Magazine
• The Long Conversation: Greta Gerwig’s Narnia and What Happens When You Try to Film Wonder?

More from Soul Search

• Zeus' Law — Hospitality in Homer's Odyssey - ABC listen
• Big questions in books — Sacredness, enchantment and the apocalypse, from Narnia to Harry Potter - ABC listen
• Imagining Jesus on screen and in literature - ABC listen

More from Radio National

• Greta Gerwig and critics discuss Barbie and Oppenheimer - ABC listen

Across the Middle East, desert caves and ancient monasteries hid troves of ancient manuscripts. Now, advances in machine learning are helping scholars to unlock these ancient texts and the lost religious worlds that produced them. 

Saint Hildegard of Bingen is perhaps Medieval Europe's most remarkable woman. She was a prolific writer, a theologian, a mystic, and Europe's first known female composer. It been about 1000 years since she lived, but why is the music she wrote so popular today?

Guests: 

Jennifer Bain is a professor from Dalhousie University in Canada. Jennifer edited the Cambridge Companion to Hildegard of Bingen, and she's also the author of several works on Hildegard's music and its reception.

Sylvia MacRitchie-Hook did postgraduate research about Hildegard as a Ramsay Scholar at the Australian Catholic University. Her thesis is Art as Revelation: A Theological Aesthetic Reading of Hildegard of Bingen's Scivias.

More info: 

• The isolation and imagination of the first female English author (Soul Search)
• Hilda-thon! Eight hours of music by Hildegard von Bingen (ABC Classic)

Contemporary religion and spirituality from the inside out.

Stories about gardening run deep in many cultures – from the garden of the gods in the epic of Gilgamesh, to the garden of Eden in the biblical book of Genesis. Gardening is also a practice that, for some people, connects the body, soil and soul. On Soul Search Costa Georgiadis shares about the life lessons he's learnt from gardening. 

Guest: 

Costa Georgiadis, presenter of Gardening Australia and the author of Costa’s World: Gardening for the soil, the soul and the suburbs.

More info: 

• How gardening is a conversation (ABC Listen)
• The science and spirituality of soil (ABC Listen)
• Costa Georgiadis visits remote NT communities to teach kids about gardening and healthy foods (ABC News)

In today's fast-paced, tech-saturated society, is it possible to live a life of fulfilment? Until his recent death, the writer, farmer and sustainability activist Wendell Berry believed that life's meaning came from cultivating the land and building meaningful relationships with one another.

In a world that prizes self-interest, is compassion a weakness? In 1992 the Dalai Lama asked a psychologist, instead of focusing only on negative emotions, why don't we study happiness and compassion? Now, the psychology of compassion has become an established field, and a place for rich conversation between science and religion. 

When you imagine an Australian Buddhist, who do you think of? Buddhism in this country has a multicultural history which reaches back before federation and the White Australia Policy. 

Yale professors Christian Wiman and Miroslav Volf have been friends for years, through serious ups and downs. Together they discuss poetry, suffering and the divine — helping one another express the big things we encounter throughout our lives.

Guests

Miroslav Volf is a theologian and the founder and director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. He is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School. He has written or edited over twenty books, including his most recent co-authored book Glimmerings: Letters on Faith Between a Poet and a Theologian. 

Christian Wiman is a poet and the Clement-Muehl Professor of Communication Arts at Yale Divinity School and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. He is also an author, editor, or translator of fourteen books, including his most recent co-authored book Glimmerings: Letters on Faith Between a Poet and a Theologian.

Read an extract of Glimmerings on ABC Religion and Ethics: ‘Glimmerings are what the soul’s composed of’: Letters between a poet and a theologian - ABC Religion & Ethics

More from Soul Search

• The Zen masters of haiku - ABC listen
• Poetry that soars — from Rumi to Australia - ABC listen
• Big questions in books — Ancient Chinese poetry and the nature of existence - ABC listen

Vote now for your favourite Australian books of all time!

https://www.abc.net.au/listen/radionational/countdown/top100books

• Toby Davidson recommends Holocaust Island, by Graeme Dixon
• Emma Beattie recommends In Their Branches, by Gretchen Miller
• Steve Biddulph recommends Night Train to Varanasi, by Sean Doyle

The Australian landscape comes up again and again in Australian poetry — it's part of what makes poetry from this place so distinctive. So, how does the contemporary Australian poetry scene engage with the land, and how has it shaped the art and spirituality of Australian poets?

GuestsLaurie May is a poet, a spoken word performer and a poetry educator based in Mparntwe/Alice Springs, and the Executive Director of Red Dirt Poetry.

Laurie May’s poetry recommendations are:

• I am the Desert, by Marie Elena Ellis I Am The Desert by Marie Elena Ellis - Red Dirt Poetry
• Home Between the Cedar Trees, by Jihad Yassine Home Between the Cedar Trees by Jihad Yassine — Guest House Publishing
• Trials of Hope, by Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes Trials of Hope (የተስፋ ፈተና) - Fremantle Press
• A Savage Turn, by Luke Patterson Luke Patterson debut poetry collection is utterly lawless - ABC listen
• The Harbour, by Dimitris Tsaloumas The poetry of Dimitris Tsaloumas - ABC listen

Laurie’s Top100 Books recommendations are:

• Seven Little Australians, by Ethel Turner
• Looking for Alibrandi, by Melina Marchetta
• Trials of Hope, by Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes

Mark Tredennick OAM is an Australian poet and essayist based outside of Bowral in New South Wales. He has received the Newcastle Poetry Prize, the Blake Poetry Prize, the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, the Calibre Essay Prize and the Wildcare Nature Writing Prize. You can read a selection of his poems and essays on his website.

Mark Tredennick’s Top 100 book recommendation is Creekwater Journal, by Robert Gray (1974)

More from Soul Search

• The Zen masters of haiku - ABC listen
• Poetry that soars — from Rumi to Australia - ABC listen
• Big questions in books — Ancient Chinese poetry and the nature of existence - ABC listen

Vote now for your favourite Australian books of all time!