Soul Search

Maps tell us all kinds of things about the places they describe. Growing up in Central Australia, Kim Mahood was fascinated by maps. Now map-making has become a collaborative project for her and a way of honouring the complexities of remote desert life.

Mindfulness has become a big deal in the West — after all, it's been shown to reduce stress. But some practitioners of colour are critiquing how mindfulness has become accommodated to systems of whiteness. Similarly, postcolonial theologians are challenging Christian conceptions of God as a white man, and the consequences that has for our society.

Do you remember the day, in 1990, when Nelson Mandela walked free from a South African prison? On Soul Search, we meet Rabbi Ralph Genende and Pearl Proud, both of whom grew up in apartheid South Africa. They've been in pursuit of healing, and reckoning with racial injustice.

There’s something mystical about the night sky. The field of astronomy can veer pretty close to the big question of the origins of the universe. Staring up at celestial bodies prompts us to wonder about the kind of universe we live in, and who we are in the midst of it.

Australia is often described as one of the most multicultural societies in the world — but as our many cultures and spiritualities slam together, how do we navigate those points of difference to tell a common story?

Join Meredith Lake and Brother Phap Hai on a mindful walk around Mountain Spring Buddhist monastery – a community of mostly Vietnamese monastics in the Plum Village tradition, founded by the late Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh in 2020.

What does it mean to be fully alive? Elizabeth Oldfield has ditched the conventional script of what life can look like — instead choosing to live in what she calls a "micro-monastery".

National NAIDOC Week has its roots in the public theology of William Cooper, but what does it mean to do Christian theology on Aboriginal land?

Over 600,000 Australians visited Japan in 2023, and most of them visited a temple or shrine — even though they wouldn’t normally do that back home. But what's the etiquette when visiting a sacred place, and what do Japanese people think? 

Christians often use the word "ministry" to describe the work of the clergy, but in Aboriginal contexts, its meaning is more expansive. There are hundreds of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples right across these lands now called Australia engaged in ministry work, but much of it is unpaid, and might not fit into non-Indigenous ideas of what ministry looks like.