Life & Faith Centre for Public Christianity

With despair on the rise and hope in short supply, children’s literature offers people of all ages a treasure trove of wisdom.
Dr Amanda B Vernon is a children’s literature expert who believes that children's stories are not just for children. In this interview with Life & Faith, Amanda talks about how stories written with children in mind often shed light on deep human needs, including our longing for justice, agency, truth, wonder and redemption through suffering. From Alice in Wonderland to Harry Potter to Winnie the Pooh, Amanda explores the joy, the wonder and the enduring wisdom of children’s literature.
Explore:
Amanda B Vernon’s website: www.amandabvernon.com
George Macdonald’s, ‘The Fantastic Imagination’
Joe Pompeo’s Vanity Fair article on utopia, dystopia and the modern imagination

Darrell Bock fears the church in the U.S. is in danger of losing its distinctiveness. How might it recover? 
The United States is a divided country, and this year’s presidential election will bring that into sharp focus. Darrell Bock is a New Testament Scholar at Dallas Theological Seminary and the Executive Director of Cultural Engagement at the Hendricks Center.
Life & Faith interviews Darrell about the divisions in the U.S. and how tribal and ideological they have become. Darrell is concerned that the church has increased this polarisation with its misplaced loyalties, and by creating a social atmosphere that does not deal well with difference. Darrell believes it has been a mistake for the church to become an extension of a political arm, and that younger people have left the church in droves as a result.
Darrell sees a great need to return to a sense of welcome and care for the marginalised, as a distinctive marker of the love of God.
Explore: 
The Hendricks Center 
Darrell Bock books (there are many) 
Breaking the Da Vinci Code: Answers to the Questions Everyone’s Asking  Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture’s Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ Gospel of Luke Commentary 

The spirit of our politics feels negative and harmful. Michael Wear believes the improved spiritual health and civic character of individuals can change that.
“We belong to a political party because we believe things, we should not believe things because we belong to a political party”.
Michael Wear is the author of The Spirit of Our Politics: Spiritual Formation and the Renovation of Public Life. In this episode he talks to Life & Faith about his desire to cultivate a more healthy and vibrant political and civic life in his country that is wracked with polarisation and enmity across the political spectrum.
Wear is under no illusions as to how large a challenge that is but remains committed to making a contribution towards a healthy pluralism.
He also has huge reservations about the way in which faith has been captured to further political, rather than religious, outcomes. Wear think there is huge danger in Christianity being instrumentalised as a means of advancing one set of political ideas. Instead, faith should be about the flourishing of all society.
Explore:
Michael Wear’s latest book The Spirit of Our Politics: Spiritual Formation and the Renovation of Public Life.
Michael’s previous book Reclaiming Hope: Lessons Learned in the Obama Whitehouse About the Future of Faith in America.
The Centre for Christianity and Public Life 

The headlines are grim, and the world feels apocalyptic. It’s time to become the people the world needs right now.
“I don't know how to fix climate change or geopolitics, but I know what I'm called to do, which is put my roots down deep into love and be growing up, be becoming the kind of person that the world needs.”
Elizabeth Oldfield is the author of the book Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times – and turbulent our times are. Climate anxiety, political polarisation, social unrest, and diminishing attention spans haunt our days. Also present, but perhaps less obviously so: our gnawing spiritual hunger and desire for connection with ourselves, each other, and maybe even what Elizabeth calls “the G bomb”: God.
In this interview with Life & Faith, Elizabeth talks about “steadiness of soul” in an increasingly chaotic world and what it means to live in a small, intentional community or “micro monastery” that can fit 18 people around the dinner table. The conversation also covers how Elizabeth has managed to cultivate a space for profound chats across social divides in the podcast The Sacred, and what it meant for Elizabeth to flout careerist dogma and quit her stable, secure job to rest and lean into a different way of life. 
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Explore:
Elizabeth Oldfield’s book Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times
Her letter about leaving her job that hit a nerve with people
Her Substack newsletter Fully Alive
The Sacred Podcast

A philosopher and a butcher dig into what we should and shouldn’t eat, and why.
“As society has shifted away from being in close proximity to farms and food production, people are increasingly concerned about where their food’s coming from – the condition under which animals are raised and reared, and certain farming practices, [such as] pesticide use and the effects that that may have on the environment as well as on human health.”
Philosopher and sociologist Chris Mayes has thought about eating a lot more than most of us (which if we’re honest, is already quite a bit). The ethics of food involves a whole raft of factors: not only the treatment of animals and the environmental impact of production, but also the treatment of workers and the impact of the growth of pastoral land on indigenous peoples.
“In Australia it seems natural that we would have sheep, and natural that wheat would be here, but in thinking of the obviousness of those practices and products here, we forget their role in dispossessing indigenous Australians – the way that the expansion of sheep, particularly throughout NSW and Victoria in the early to mid-nineteenth century, was coinciding with a lot of these most brutal massacres.”
Chris considers what it means for lamb to be Australia’s national cuisine – and how you make Scriptures that rely on the language of sheep and shepherds meaningful within a non-pastoralist culture.
Then: Tom Kaiser is Simon Smart’s local butcher. Perhaps unusually for a butcher, he thinks people should eat less meat. He sells meat products that many would consider to be expensive in what he calls the “Masterchef era”.
“Affluence definitely plays a big part. They can afford to have the product that they see on TV. We know for a fact that we wouldn’t be able to charge the price, nor have the same model we have in different parts of Australia. … Ethics is obviously multi-layered. It comes to personal beliefs. It comes down to knowledge.”
Explore:
Chris Mayes’ book Unsettling Food Politics: Agriculture, Dispossession and Sovereignty in Australia
CPX’s new podcast The Week @ CPX

The astonishing technological progress humans have made sometimes raises the warning that we shouldn’t be “playing God”. Nick Spencer from Theos think tank disagrees. 
In their book Playing God: science, religion, and the future of humanity, Nick Spencer and Hannah Waite insist that contrary to the warnings to avoid “playing God”, human beings are in fact a God-playing species and have a responsibility to ‘play God’ well.   
They examine remarkable advancements we have made in technological capability—AI, pharmacology and genetic engineering, knowledge of outer space, genetic editing, healing in the womb—and note that the world that science is creating raises exactly the kind of questions that science can’t answer. Their book is a plea to maintain an open and multi-voiced language to address these questions drawing on ethical, humanistic and spiritual layers.
On Life & Faith this week Nick Spencer joined Simon Smart to delve into some urgent contemporary questions that all coalesce around the notion of who we are as humans.
Explore 
Nick Spencer and Hannah Waite, Playing God: Science, Religion and the Future of Humanity 
Theos Think Tank
Centre for Public Christianity