Soul Search ABC listen

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.

How do we make and find meaning alongside one another, in community? 

We live in a society that's becoming increasingly atomised in all kinds of spheres. But what might it look like if we, instead, paid attention to the social — and spiritual — dimensions of life together?

Sharon Hollis and Charissa Suli each have unique life experiences that speak to this question, and they are both prominent leaders of one of Australia's largest faith communities.