Matters of Life & Death

Assisted dying: The Meacher Bill, radicals in the Lords, Canada’s slippery slope and fragile conscience protections

8 Oct 2021
38:44

This week we’re digging into assisted dying. A bill to legalise it in England has been introduced to parliament – what does it propose and how likely is it to actually become law? And zooming out a little, what are the social factors behind this rene...

Abusive leadership: Mark Driscoll, the hermeneutic of suspicion, Sigmund Freud’s chaise longue, and Paul-Timothy relationships

30 Aug 2021
46:17

Today’s episode is a little hard to sum up – we begin by reflecting on the recent series of scandals around abusive church leaders, before going to discuss how contemporary culture thinks about sex and power (and in particular how they are exploited)...

The Robot Will See You Now: Human uniqueness, AI musicians, surveillance capitalism and ditching Google

20 Jul 2021
53:56

This episode was inspired by John’s new book – The Robot Will See You Now – which was published last week. It’s a multi-author volume he has co-edited with the theologian Stephen Williams, where they have gathered an array of theologians, academics a...

Coronavirus: Miscounting deaths, the Sun’s front page, key workers with long covid and vaccine generosity

26 May 2021
56:27

In today’s episode we’re returning to the coronavirus pandemic. It’s been almost six months since we last dedicated an episode to covid, and since then a lot has happened. Hundreds of millions of vaccine doses have been delivered around the world, bu...

John Stott: Double listening, salt as preservative, incarnational mission, and the challenge of evangelical hagiography

4 May 2021
52:36

Last week marked 100 years since the late John Stott was born and there has been a flurry of events to mark the centenary of this highly influential vicar, Bible teacher and evangelical leader. He also had a huge impact on John's own life and career...

Simulation: Deep fakes, image as sacrament, David Beckham in Mandarin and therapy chatbots

15 Mar 2021
51:45

Today’s topic is simulation. We live in an era when digital technology is making it increasingly easy and cheap to create fake but compelling images or videos of people, or even entirely artificial human-like personalities. Machine learning tools and...

Digital church: Worship on Zoom, pandemic revival, time-shifting and Gnosticism

24 Feb 2021
35:12

This episode explores one of the most significant and potentially long-lasting ways the covid pandemic has affected church life – the shift to digital. Ever since the first lockdown began almost a year ago, churches of every shape and size and from e...

Social media and free speech: Fake news, Facebook’s ’Supreme Court’, the Capitol riot and YouTube algorithms

22 Jan 2021
36:24

In today’s episode we’re taking a sideways step from the covid pandemic and instead are discussing social media and free speech.The banning of Donald Trump from every social media platform following the deadly riot earlier this month at the US Capito...

Coronavirus: Misinformation

16 Dec 2020
37:13

Microchips. Bill Gates. The mark of the beast. 5G cell towers. False positive rates. Big pharma. DNA alteration. It’s been hard to avoid the swirling morass of misinformation and conspiracy theories around the pandemic. And this confusion and fear ha...

Coronavirus: Vaccines - part 3

11 Dec 2020
36:11

The first coronavirus vaccine jabs have already gone into the arms of people here in the UK, as Britain this week became the first country in the world to actually deploy a vaccine which had completed all its clinical trials and been signed off by th...

Coronavirus: The second lockdown

11 Nov 2020
44:01

The second coronavirus lockdown started here in the UK on 5 November and is due to last the rest of the month. Unlike the first time round in the spring, we aren’t going into this with our eyes closed – we know the lockdown will cause immense economi...

Coronavirus: Vaccines - part 2

9 Nov 2020
19:16

We received a fascinating question from a listener after our last episode on vaccines, picking up on the competing and perhaps contradictory philosophies behind the anti-vax movement. So we decided to respond to their question and thoughts with a spe...

Coronavirus: Vaccines - part 1

8 Oct 2020
42:29

There are about 40 different potential covid vaccines already being tested on humans, with almost a hundred more at earlier stages of development in the lab. The delivery of a vaccine is seen by many as the silver bullet which could end the pandemic...

Coronavirus: Mental health, anxiety and hope

10 Sep 2020
37:29

We’re back after a slightly longer than expected summer break with a new episode, all about our fears, anxieties and hopes amid the pandemic. People are afraid of the virus, and understandably so after months of the government stoking our anxiety to...

Coronavirus: Technology - part 2

24 Jun 2020
27:59

In the second part of our conversation on technology during the coronavirus pandemic, we look into our crystal balls and try to imagine what the world of tech will look like in the future, thanks to Covid-19. Are the major American tech companies are...