Life & Faith Centre for Public Christianity

Mercy Aiken tells Life & Faith of the joy-filled, yet painful life of Palestinian Christian, Bishara Awad.
Bishara was a child in Jerusalem when his father was shot and killed during the Israeli-Arab war of 1948. The story of his life and that of his family provides a sobering portrait of life in Israel/Palestine during decades of war, violence, tension and dashed dreams for those seeking a peaceful resolution to conflict.
Somehow, Bishara, a Palestinian Christian and community leader, remains unbowed, but also forgiving and empathetic towards his opponents. 
His story is told in the book, Yet in the Dark Streets Shining – a Palestinian Story of Hope and Resilience in Bethlehem. 
The coauthor of the book is Mercy Aiken – who came into the CPX studio. Mercy was in Australia with the Palestine Israel Ecumenical Network.
The book: 
Yet in the Dark Streets Shining – a Palestinian Story of Hope and Resilience in Bethlehem
Palestine Israel Ecumenical Network 

Asuntha Charles has lived in some toughest places in the world. And she’s loved it.  
 
Long 
 
As a young woman, Asuntha Charles stubbornly defied her culture to advocate for vulnerable women and girls. That determination never left her as she dedicated her life to voiceless people in not only her native India, but places like Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Sudan and Iraq.
Here she tells Life & Faith about her extraordinary life of service and care for people who needed that care most. And we also get an insight into the early influences that shaped her life and contributed to her holding a faith that sustains her even in the face of risk, and heartbreaking losses.
Try listening to this and not be challenged and inspired!
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War correspondent Janine di Giovanni has covered the near-extinction of the ancient Christian communities of the Middle East.  
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“They’ve survived plagues, they’ve survived pillages, they’ve survived raids, they’ve survived purges – and they most recently survived ISIS.”  
The Christian communities of the Middle East – in places like Iraq and Syria, Egypt and Palestine – are ancient, and over recent decades have been facing various kinds of existential threat. Janine di Giovanni’s book The Vanishing: The Twilight of Christianity in the Middle East is a work of “pre-archaeology”, recording the stories and courage of these communities even as they disappear.  
Di Giovanni is a war correspondent and human rights investigator who has covered 18 wars and 3 genocides across her career, bearing witness to the terrible things that happen in our world. In this episode, she talks about visiting churches in war zones, why people stay, and whether faith – including her own belief in God – is strong enough to survive war. She also shares a bit about her current work with The Reckoning Project, a war crimes unit working within Ukraine.  
“It's been an honour to work for 35 years in all these war zones with these extraordinary people. I feel very privileged and lucky every day of my life that I do this work, because … I have a purposeful life.” 
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EXPLORE: 
The Vanishing: The Twilight of Christianity in the Middle East, by Janine di Giovanni 
The Reckoning Project 
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CPX writers talk about how they’re hoping to breathe new life into a very old story.  
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Get a glimpse into the CPX writers’ room as Simon, Natasha, Justine and Max talk about what they’re writing about Easter, or how they go about working out how to write about Easter.  
Natasha talks about American novelist Marilynne Robinson’s new book Reading Genesis and how Robinson’s courteous and unapologetic way of doing “public Christianity” messes with how public conversations about God usually happen.  
Max discusses how we may admire heroes for their greatness – like Homer’s Achilles, for example – but we really long for goodness, expressed by saviours who willingly sacrifice themselves for others. 
Simon discusses how a quirk of the calendar can put Anzac Day and Easter in proximity to each other, bringing those two events and their focus on sacrifice into conversation.  
Justine talks about death denial among the tech titans of Silicon Valley who hope to solve the problem of death. She argues that they express what life feels like if Easter Saturday – the day Jesus lay dead in the grave – is never followed by Easter Sunday – the day that changed everything, according to the Christian faith, because it is the day that Jesus rose to new life.  
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Explore: 
Natasha’s piece on Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis 
An article Simon wrote linking Anzac Day with Easter 
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We explore the spiritual needs of people in intensive care in hospital, or behind bars. 
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“I went to see this lady and as soon as I walked in, she actually said, ‘f*** off, I don’t want to have anything to do with you people’.” 
Chaplaincy in Australia is contested. If people have had a bad experience with the church or concerned that someone might be trying to manipulate them, a chaplain walking up to say hi might get that response. Not least because people can be very vulnerable if they’re dealing with a shocking medical episode in hospital or grappling with life in prison. 
This Life & Faith episode takes you behind the scenes of two very different environments: the intensive care unit of a major Sydney hospital, and Kirkconnell Correctional Centre in regional NSW. Two chaplains from Jericho Road, a social service organisation linked with the Presbyterian Church in NSW, tell us about what it’s like to care spiritually for people during very difficult times in their lives.  
Content warning: there are some challenging stories told in these interviews. This episode is not suitable for children. 
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Explore: 
Jericho Road’s Love Your Neighbour course on chaplaincy
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For decades now in the West, religion has been on the retreat. In places where, 50 years ago, going to church on a Sunday was just what you did, we’ve had generations now for whom that would be a very foreign concept.  
Justin Brierley is an author and very popular podcaster. For 17 years he hosted a podcast called Unbelievable where he would bring together atheist and Christian thinkers for civil and robust discussion. He presided over conversations with some of the world’s great minds for these dialogues and modelled a brilliant way to disagree civilly.  
Justin has just published a book called The Surprising Re-birth of Belief in God: Why New Atheism Grew Old and Secular Thinkers Are Considering Christianity Again. He detects a shift in the air and the possibility that the thoroughly secular vision of the world might not be cutting it for people today. Is that his imagination or might there be something to this? 
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Explore: 
Justin’s latest book: https://justinbrierley.com/the-surprising-rebirth-of-belief-in-god/ 
And the podcast at: 
The Surprising Rebirth podcast: https://justinbrierley.com/surprisingrebirth/ 
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