Life & Faith

Valerie Browning on the choices that led to her life among the Afar nomads of the Ethiopian desert. --- “Why do you protect yourself? Life without risk is not life, it is simply not life.” Valerie Browning is a nurse and midwife who has spent the last 30 years among the Afar people of Ethiopia. She has endured civil war and snakebite, extreme heat and malaria, and nearly died in childbirth. She daily takes on the hardships confronting her people: famine, cholera, infant mortality, illiteracy, climate change, and the real causes of poverty.  It’s an unexpected path for someone who was born in England and grew up in country NSW. In this interview, Valerie explains what’s wonderful about Afar life, explains how she keeps going in the face of overwhelming need, and puts us all on the hook for the choices we make in our affluent Western context. “I see in the life of the Afar almost the life of the four Gospels. Where was Christ? Was he sitting in a very comfortable chair? Did he iron his clothes every day? Did he

Tim Costello on what resources we have in the face of overwhelming human need.  --- “So much of our experience is that there’s such goodness in people, and generosity. But when you see evil and look it in the eye, it’s overwhelming.”  From arguing with Vladimir Putin about political dissidents and the relationship of church and state, to witnessing the devastation of the 2004 tsunami or the power of forgiveness in post-genocide Rwanda, Tim Costello has had an inside view of some of the most fraught issues of our time.  In the second part of Simon Smart’s interview with the man who’s been called “Australia’s pastor”, Tim shares lessons from his time as CEO of World Vision Australia, including questions around suffering and trauma, what a reasonable refugee policy would look like, burnout, and what makes humanitarian efforts genuinely effective.  “Boil down all the books on development in all the libraries in the world - and there’s hundreds of thousands of volumes - they really come down to: what works? It’s r

Tim Costello, Australia’s favourite social justice advocate, looks back on a storied, surprising life. --- “I don’t think you ever understand your faith until you’re out of your own culture and have to see it through other cultural lenses … The Italian Baptists all voted communist. They believed the Christian Democrats, with the Mafia, with even the Catholic church, would never clean up corruption in Italy. Only a communist government would. And I just knew God was in heaven, Bob Menzies was in the lodge, and we Christians only voted Liberal, or conservative.”  The title of Tim Costello’s just-released memoir, A Lot with a Little, reflects his sense that the doors that have opened to him across his life have been more than he deserved. As a Baptist minister and lawyer, erstwhile mayor of St Kilda, and for many years CEO of World Vision Australia, his journey reflects his understanding that Christian faith is not a respectable, middle-class thing.  “So much of the Bible forces us to ask the questions of, who h

The untold story of what drove Vincent Lingiari to lead the Wave Hill walk-off. --- “Those stories are as true and as real as someone having the audacity to say ‘I have a dream’ that racism will be changed in the United States of America. They’re the sorts of dreams that would motivate a leader to hold an eight-year campaign as opposed to an eight-week campaign.” It’s been 53 years since Vincent Lingiari led 200 Gurundji people—Aboriginal stockmen, domestic workers, and their families—on a walk-off from the Wave Hill cattle station in protest against atrocious housing and working conditions, meagre provisions and unequal pay. That strike morphed into an eight-year campaign to reclaim the traditional lands of the Gurundji people, and one that was realised—symbolically, at least—when in 1975, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam poured red dirt into Vincent Lingiari’s hands in symbolic recognition of Indigenous sovereignty. The walk-off and the ensuing protest are now seen as the birth of the land rights movement in Au

Mark Greene on the frustrations, and the potential, of work in contemporary Western culture.  --- “It’s not at all clear to me that the way the work is currently being structured in Western culture is good for the majority of the people in it.”  Mark Greene grew up Jewish, and worked for a long time in advertising in London and New York. These days, he’s Executive Director of the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity, and he spends a lot of his time thinking, speaking, and writing about the nature of work - which also means, the nature of God, and humans, and our life together.  "Camus famously said: work is not everything, but when work sours, all life stifles and dies. I think people are created for purposeful activity.”  In this episode, Mark considers our problematic experience of work, shares three key things that the research suggests make work enriching rather than soul-destroying, and tells stories of workplaces that are doing things differently.  --- Mark was in Sydney in July 2019 as a keyn

Why might someone who’s not religious want to send their kids to a faith-based school?  --- “Teachers are one of the few groups of people in society who can tell other people what to do in their discretionary time and - by and large - they obey.”  Education is among our core activities as a society - so it’s unsurprising that it can be a battleground for all sorts of ideas.  David I. Smith is Professor of Education at Calvin University, and he has spent decades thinking about how education really forms people. He says that there’s no such thing as a “vanilla” or “neutral” education - and that even a maths or a French textbook will imply a whole way of seeing the world and other people.  “We spent a lot of time learning how to say in French and German, ‘This is my name. This is my favourite food. I like this music. I don’t like biology. This is what I did last weekend. I would like two train tickets to Hamburg. I would like the steak and fries. I would like a hotel room for two nights.’ So the implicit message

Two conversations, two stories of lives committed to justice and the flourishing of others.  --- “The rescue of one person matters infinitely - it matters to that person, and it matters to us - and at the same time, that one rescue can send a ripple effect through a system of millions of people who are enslaved and exploited.” In this episode of Life & Faith, we bring together two conversations with remarkable women working to bring justice to situations of terrible brokenness.  Bethany Hoang spent many years with International Justice Mission, an organisation seeking to fix broken justice systems, end slavery, and bring healing to its victims.  “The need is staggering when you really wade into these places of deep darkness - but when you see the rescue come it is just overwhelming, and you just want to see more and more of it and give your whole life to it.”  Ruth Padilla DeBorst is a theologian, wife and mother, educator and storyteller, based in Costa Rica. She’s committed to community development and

Philosopher Steven Garber on how we see our world, and ourselves. --- “Though we mostly don’t talk this way or see things this way, I think we are all profound religious people in that deepest sense - we are homo adorans, to use the Latin here. We will care most about something, we will commit ourselves most deeply to something. Homo adorans: we will adore something, we’ll make something most important to us.”  Steven Garber is Professor of Marketplace Theology and Leadership at Regent College in Vancouver. In this conversation with Simon Smart, he manages to still some of the clamour of our world in order to understand what it’s like to be human in this time and place.  This episode of Life & Faith ranges far and wide - from karma to stoicism, from Vàclav Havel to Peter Singer, from the Smashing Pumpkins to U2, from amusing ourselves to death to the dark night of the soul, and what the biggest song on the biggest album of the year has to tell us about what it’s like to be young today. There’s something

  Film and TV critic Alissa Wilkinson on the end of the world - as pop culture imagines it. --- “Dystopia is like the more woke version of utopia. It’s where we’re working out our biggest anxieties as a culture. For instance, does the human race deserve to continue? Or would it be better if we just went away?” Alissa Wilkinson fell into film and television criticism after completing a degree in computer science – which she says actually helps her analyse culture well.  “I think my job is to watch a movie as well as I can, and then be able to look at my reaction to it as a good watcher and articulate why that reaction happened, and then also to make space for the reader to have their own experience with the work of art,” Alissa says. “Sometimes [my job is] to just say ‘this is bad’ or ‘this is a masterpiece’, but if I don’t add the ‘why?’ then I’m not doing my job at all as a critic.” She’s particularly fascinated by ‘“end of the world’” narratives and is the co-author of How to Survive the Apocalypse: Zombies

  50 years on from the moon landing seems like a good time to ask a few existential questions. --- “He said he could stand on the moon, look up to earth, and with this gloved hand hold up his thumb and cover the entire planet. Under his thumb - every mountain, every river, every city, every person he knew, all the people he didn’t ... It made him feel terrifyingly small and vulnerable.”  It’s 50 years since the Apollo 11 mission put humans on the moon for the first time.  It was an event that captured the imagination of people across the world, and successive generations since. Four days after blasting off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the crew radioed to Mission Control in Houston: “The Eagle has landed.” In the stillness following the landing, before taking communion with bread and wine he had brought specially for the occasion, lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin sent this message back to Earth:  “I’d like to take this opportunity to ask every person listening in, whoever and wherever they may be, to pa

There’s sadness and hope on the long road towards Aboriginal recognition and reconciliation. --- “He said to me, ‘never forget you’re an Aboriginal, but do the best you can in a white man’s world’. So that’s what I’ve tried to do. With the help of the Lord Jesus.” Every year, National Reconciliation Week celebrates the relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians. The theme for 2017 is: “Let’s take the next steps”. It seems pretty fitting because while there have been some important, and long overdue, moves towards reconciliation, there’s no doubt that many more steps still need to be taken. In this episode, stories from Cummeragunja, a significant place when it comes to Aboriginal rights, recognition – and Christianity. Hear from Uncle Denis Atkinson who explains his problem with the word “reconciliation”, and says there’s only “one good thing” to come from white settlement in Australia for Aboriginal people. Also, Aunty Maureen shares her powerful story about growing up on Umeewarra Missio

Michael Ramsden on how we respond to injustice: as nations, groups, and individuals. --- “There’s a very interesting phrase in the Old Testament where it says you’ve turned justice into bitterness. In a more poetical translation it says you’ve turned justice into bitterness, so your righteous acts taste like poisoned fruit. In other words, if your motivation for justice is bitterness, even if you get that which is right, it can taste like poison to everybody else.” Michael Ramsden has been thinking about our culture’s struggles with injustice and disagreement a lot lately. In this conversation with Natasha Moore, he talks about what it means to live in a “victim culture” - according to definitions from history and psychology, rather than the opinion pages that rail against “snowflake” millennials! - and our options for responding to past trauma.  From the Balkans to the Holocaust, Superman movies to very personal stories of trauma and forgiveness, Michael helps us interrogate how we construct our identities,

Michael Ramsden talks to everyone from politicians to terrorists about culture, faith, and Jesus. “I just thought if I became a Christian my life would become worse … I was 100% sure that I was sacrificing on the altar of truth my only chance for happiness in this world.” Michael Ramsden was a very unlikely convert to Christianity - and that’s the least unlikely of the stories he has to tell in this two-part interview. From talking to Australian MPs on the day of a leadership spill to being invited to spend time with terrorist groups, he has a lot of interesting conversations with interesting people.  In this episode of Life & Faith, Michael offers a window onto the various worlds he’s part of, and some cultural observations that we may find more skewering than is comfortable.  “[We] struggle with the sense of commitment that’s required, all the time forgetting that all relationship relies on commitment. Whatever you’re slightly committed to is going to feel shallow by comparison. So although some commitm

Life & Faith tackles a series of moral dilemmas around poverty and luxury, beauty and utility.  --- How can we act ethically in a world that contains so much suffering?  One of our Facebook followers articulated the moral dilemma involved in devoting money to “non-essential” things when they commented on a Life & Faith episode about the Museum of the Bible, a $400-million project being built in Washington DC. They posted:  “Surely it is better to spend the time, money and energy required for this project on putting what Jesus said into practice. What about feeding the homeless on the streets of DC.”  It’s a fair point - but it’s also a slippery slope.  If we’re truly paying attention to the poverty in our local communities and around the world, how can we ever spend money on a pair of nice shoes, an expensive holiday, or even our morning coffee? For that matter, how can we justify art and culture? Is it frivolous to spend money on beautiful things, or to spend time making or enjoying art, rather than

John Haldane on virtue, happiness, narcissism, and the possibility of God. --- “Philosophy from its origins has always had its focus on the idea that we investigate thought and the world and so on in order to answer the question: how ought I to live?” John Haldane is that rare breed, a public intellectual. He’s an academic philosopher who also works hard to introduce philosophical concepts to the rest of us in ways that connect with our lives. “Anybody who is seriously interested in living their own life well is going to be somebody who is looking for answers to questions and they’re going to talk to others and so on. They’re not going to think that they can just generate that out of themselves - or they ought not to think that.” Simon Smart grills John on unhappiness and virtue, self-love, what higher education is really for, optimism and pessimism, and whether arguments for the existence of God have any traction. He also asks: what personal reasons do you have for being a Christian? How do you arrive at bel

Life & Faith hears from two young women who’ve made some very counter-cultural choices. --- “Sometimes we’ve been mistaken for many other things. We have a convent in New York City, and one night our Sisters were walking on the streets, back to one of our convents. A group approached them and said, ‘Hey Sisters, what’s the show on Broadway tonight?’ I mean, you see a lot of things in New York, and we’re just part of it. Then we were in Sydney too, a little girl boarded a bus one day when there were a few of us on, and said, ‘Look Mum, all these women are getting married today.’ You know, so it’s a sight unseen.”  Sister Jean Marie and Sister Mary Grace are Sisters of Life. They’ve taken vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience – the vows that nuns have taken for centuries – as well as an extra vow, to protect and enhance the sacredness of every human life. Their order is often described as “pro-life”, but Sister Mary Grace says she likes to think of their work as radically “pro-woman”, supporting mother

A conversation with film critic CJ Johnson, for anyone who’s ever loved a film. --- CJ Johnson was an only child who grew up watching Bill Collins present the best of Hollywood every Friday and Saturday night on Channel 10, and who calls film his “first real friend”. These days, he’s a film critic, lecturer, and playwright who watches and thinks about movies for a living and reviews them for the ABC, among other places.  That’s how he met Simon Smart - the two appeared together on an episode of ABC Radio’s Nightlife program one Easter to talk about some of the myriad cinematic versions of the Jesus story.  "I came to respect that that story, in the New Testament, is a bloody good story - just an outrageously brilliant story. For the first time, I got properly an understanding of why that story is beloved by a certain sizeable chunk of the planet. And it was seeing it told cinematically that got me to that place.”  In this conversation, CJ and Simon try to get to the bottom of their love of film; touch on clas

What could make someone give up everything to serve some of the world’s poorest women? --- "As a junior doctor I went to Ethiopia to work with my aunt in the desert area, and we were just wandering around the desert with camels, treating people under trees and shrubs and things in 50-degree heat … You’d have to sleep with a guard with a gun because the hyenas get quite close, so every now and then you’d get woken up with a gunshot and this hyena yelping off in the distance. And then a bit later that night a camel was bellowing just a few metres away from my head and gives birth, and I get splattered with all this amniotic fluid." Andrew Browning has spent more than 17 years in Africa as a missionary doctor. As a medical student, he spent time working with Rwandan refugees fleeing the genocide; as a junior doctor, he joined Catherine Hamlin at the Fistula Hospital in Ethiopia, dedicating his life to helping women who are suffering from debilitating childbirth injuries.  In this episode of Life & Faith, And

Checkpoints, borders, normalcy, and hope: a sketch of daily life in the West Bank.  --- Areej Masoud lives in Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus. In terms of physical distance, it’s very close to Jerusalem. In terms of social reality, it’s a world away.  “If I want to go to Jerusalem, I need to get a permit. It’s not like I want to go, and I just start my car and leave. I would have to go through the pedestrian walk, and to do that I need to get a permit. The permit is not like a visa with clear criteria why you get it, why you don’t get it. I would need to go to a military base to request that, and you most probably won’t get it. But if you do, you need to go and wait at the checkpoint … it’s very humiliating.”  Areej is a Palestinian Christian, which means she belongs to a people who once made up 30 per cent of the population. These days, they make up less than 1 per cent of those living on the West Bank.  "I always felt jealous of other Christians, where their worst enemy could be their neighbour, or their

Os Guinness talks freedom, human rights, and why the 1960s counterculture was the best moment to come of age. --- “In Europe, you could go to any crossroads - we lived in Switzerland then - and there’d be six hitchhikers. One would be reading Nietzsche, one would be reading Siddhartha, one would be reading Robert Heinlein, and one would reading C. S. Lewis, and they’d say ‘hey man, you should read this’, or ‘you should go there’. People were really thinking.”  Os Guinness is an author and speaker with a keen eye for how culture works. He was born in China during World War II, survived a famine and the Cultural Revolution, and came of age in the midst of the counterculture of the 1960s. “I’m so glad that I’m a child of the 60s”, he tells Simon Smart. “It was wild, but I’m glad it forced me to think through my faith, and to relate my faith to all that was going on.”  In this episode of Life & Faith, Guinness talks about some of his influences - and most outlandish experiences! - from that time, and the impo