The big news for Christians is that this year we had BOTH a new Pope and – for the Anglican communion – the announcement of a new Archbishop of Canterbury.

For Catholics, of course, Leo was the surprise choice at the papal conclave in May.  The first pope from the United States. And the first from the Order of Saint Augustine. And Dr Sarah Mullally will be the first woman to be enthroned as the Church of England’s senior bishop at Canterbury Cathedral in March next year.

Anglicanism is reaching what could be an emerging global schism in the church. Next March the bishops of the conservative Global Anglican Future Conference or GAFCON have been summoned to meet in Nigeria. This could well be one of the most eventful Anglican assemblies in history.

This year saw fundamental change in the power of Artificial Intelligence. For centuries we've defined ourselves by capacities we thought were uniquely human — reasoning, language, creativity, pattern recognition. 

We are now at the stage where Artificial Intelligence makes decisions and generates ideas that we can't fully explain or understand. It may well be a paradigm shift at least as big as evolution.

And...the Zionist Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari famously said this year – 2025 – may be the biggest turning in Jewish history since the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70 CE. Harari says Judaism has survived every catastrophe imaginable – even the Holocaust – but never until now has it faced a spiritual catastrophe.

GUESTS:

• Andrew West from the Religion and Ethics Report
• Meredith Lake from Soul Search 
• Senior religious reporter and Editor, Religion and Ethics, Noel Debien
• Scott Stephens from The Minefield