Matters of Life & Death

Coronavirus: The Omicron variant, mandatory vaccination, pandemic solidarity, and memories of authoritarianism

17 Dec 2021
35:19

The Omicron variant has in a few short weeks almost taken over the pandemic. This highly transmissible version of covid is raising afresh complicated ethical questions about vaccine distribution and international solidarity between nations. How can w...

Reproductive technologies: the ’Google baby’, Oliver O’Donovan, 14-day-old embryos, and techno-optimism

9 Dec 2021
54:37

This week we are resuming our conversation about infertility which begun in our previous episode. If you haven’t yet listened to that discussion, which focused on IVF, we’d recommend pausing this and going back to it as we will build on some of the i...

Infertility and IVF: Hidden wounds, premature quintuplets, embryo donation and the procreative-unitive bond

10 Nov 2021
40:38

Today we are delving into a complex and sensitive topic – infertility and IVF. The statistics suggest about one in seven couples will be unable to conceive without some kind of medical intervention, and the most popular form of reproductive treatment...

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...

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