Soul Search

A lapsed Catholic and a professor of theology on why there's a whole lot more to atheism than mere unbelief, and how atheists and theists may have more in common than you think.

Join Soul Search host Meredith Lake and curator Sue Cramer as they take you on an audio tour of Hilma af Klint's works of incredible vibrancy and power that demonstrate her spiritual adventurousness and bravery – incredible, massive paintings that were kept secret for decades after her death.

Muslim cameleers have a rich history in Australia – that you may not have heard much about. They're the men who transformed the economic, cultural and spiritual life of many outback communities at the turn of the 20th century.

What are the possibilities for a grounded spirituality, in the aftermath of colonisation? Indigenous theologian Garry Deverell has lived the search for a spirituality that connects land and body. He joins Meredith Lake to discuss ritual, reconnection and reconciliation.

This NAIDOC week Meredith Lake hands over the mic to guest presenter Brooke Prentis. Brooke is a Wakka Wakka woman who was born on Yidinji country, grew up mainly in Gubbi Gubbi country, but now lives on Gadigal land in Sydney. She's also an Aboriginal Christian leader and she shares about her journey of faith, the Aboriginal Christian leaders that inspire her, and what she's up to in her current role as CEO of Common Grace, a Christian movement in Australia.

In the lead up to the Olympic Games in Tokyo we look at the relationship between religion and sport. We speak to young Christian athlete Nicola McDermott, Olympian and Shia Muslim Hayder Shkara, and Japanese writer Shotaro Honda Moore.

Mountains have often been the location for spiritual experiences, or breakthroughs. On Soul Search today, we're turning to the mountains in our third — and final — episode on Sacred Landscapes. We meet Dr Thomas Michael, an expert on the religious significance of mountains in Eastern and Western thought, and Gary Khor, Grandmaster of tai chi, who goes on regular journeys to sacred mountains in China.

Trees have a special place in the human imagination and they feature in many of the world’s cultural and religious traditions. The ancient Hebrew poets even imagined trees themselves shouting for joy in praise of a divine creator. Today we explore the forest as a sacred landscape in Northern Ethiopia, and at the Wat Buddha Dhamma Monastery nestled within the Dharug National Park in New South Wales.

How do the places we love shape our sense of the sacred? And how are our spiritual lives nurtured by the bush, the mountains — or even the sea? In the first episode of our 3-part series Sacred Landscapes, we hear from Mary Evelyn Tucker, co-founder and director of the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale University, who tells us why religion and spiritual matter in the Anthropocene. Then we hear from Rev Dr Jione Havea, a pastor from Tonga, on what it means to him to belong to the islands and to their seas.

Many Indigenous languages have a word that means something like ‘deep listening’. In Ngan'gikurunggurr, a Northern Territory language, that word is dadirri. We hear from renowned Aboriginal elder and Senior Australian of the Year, Dr Miriam Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann, who advocates for a kind of listening — a quiet awareness — that sums up a whole way of being. We also meet Wiradjuri and Wailwaan woman Fleur Magick Dennis on a different kind of meditation and ethical reflection this Reconciliation week.