“Am I actually allowed to ask that?” is a question I asked often in the first couple of years of the podcast. In every instance, often to my great surprise, “yes” was the answer. The roof did not cave. The sky did not fall. Whatever we mean when we use the word God, it seems that it is a mystery large enough, loving enough, and safe enough to handle a question or two. With that freedom fuelling us, the journey has been an extraordinary one.
How do we find a way back to one another, across shrill voices and opposing
How do we talk about God when that word conjures a big other, looking down from a throne in the sky directing the traffic on earth? The language instead of a God who offers power “with” rather than power “over”, draws us into sacred relationship with one another and all creation.
Despite the popular naming of the conflict as incredibly complex, Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh explains the model is simply settler colonialism, the same motivation and mechanisms experienced by the Indigenous people of Australia.
Our culture and indeed our church so often misguidedly believe that love can still be present where one group or individual dominates another. The church has not only been silent, but in some of its teachings has actively supported structures of dominance and control.
Dr Garry Worete Deverell, a Trawloolway man from northern Tasmania, joins the podcast to explore country and kin as the building blocks of life and spirituality and the web of past, present and future which is expressed as ‘the dreaming’. Paying attention may be the first step in practising a faith that is at home in this land even as we long for the reconciliation which begins in listening to the truth of Australia’s violent colonising history.
Coming out once is challenging, but Jayne Ozanne describes coming out three times: first as gay, then coming out as Christian to her LGBTIQ+ friends, and finally as evangelical to her Christian LGBTIQ+ friends.
