Matters of Life & Death

In each episode of Matters of Life and Death, brought to you by Premier Unbelievable, John Wyatt and his son Tim discuss issues in healthcare, ethics, technology, science, faith and more. John is a doctor, professor of ethics, and writer and speaker on these topics, while Tim is a religion and social affairs journalist. We talk about how Christians can better engage with a particular question of life, death or something else in between.

Q&A: The contradictions which underpin anti-suicide efforts in an era of euthanasia, and are there any honest and unbiased journalists left these days?

24 Jan 2024
00:42:38

Some more listener questions: what kind of line is crossed once a country legalises euthanasia and how can a state simultaneously fund suicide prevention for some while offering state-sanctioned and facilitated assisting dying for others? Will this c...

Egg freezing: The ticking biological clock, prosecco and cheese evenings, the culture war over maternal age, and living with wisdom and contentment

17 Jan 2024
00:56:38

Increasing numbers of women are choosing to freeze their eggs in the hope that years down the line they can use these younger, healthier eggs to have children once their relationship, personal, financial or work circumstances are right. And fertility...

Genetics: Libraries of recipe books, BRCA1, Gattaca, and Big Data Towers of Babel

10 Jan 2024
00:59:01

A final classic episode to see us through the Christmas and New Year break. Today we’re returning to an interview with NHS geneticist Melody Redman. Each of us carries around in our cells about 20,000 different genes – a unique set of biological code...

Pregnancy crisis: A constructive Christian response, heads versus hearts, paternalistic gynaecologists, and ambiguity in the ultrasound clinic

3 Jan 2024
01:04:23

Today we’re returning to a classic episode from our back catalogue, with special guest Sophie Guthrie-Kummer from Choices, a Christian crisis pregnancy centre in London. Abortion is a flashpoint issue in both the church and wider culture, with the ve...

Climate anxiety: ’Delay means death’, Extinction Rebellion, throwing pebbles into God’s river, and rediscovering lament

27 Dec 2023
00:58:28

This week we’re bringing you an episode from our back catalogue, this time from March 2022. The latest report from the UN's climate scientists was both incredibly downbeat about climate change and almost entirely ignored by a media fixated on Ukraine...

Q&A: Should we welcome the coming wave of anti-obesity drugs, and what’s at stake in the argument over the 14-day limit on embryo research?

20 Dec 2023
00:42:48

Our final Q&A episode of the year tackles two medical ethics questions in the news recently. The first is Wegovy, the ground-breaking anti-obesity drug which has been a controversial sensation in the United States. It is now available (in very li...

Redemption: Always Plan A, sharing in Christ’s sufferings, a Disney fairy story, and the offensive incarnation

13 Dec 2023
00:40:50

Creation. Fall. Redemption. New Creation. Our series on the theological foundations of Christian ethics and the grand narrative of the Bible has reached the third chapter – redemption. How is the story of what Christ accomplished on the cross a uniqu...

Palliative care: Dogs and Guinness on the wards, complicated grief, DNAR discussions, and resisting assisted dying

6 Dec 2023
01:03:23

John’s on holiday this week so we’re bringing you a classic episode from the Matters of Life and Death vault. A couple of years ago we interviewed Sarah Foot, a Christian palliative care doctor. She spoke about how she treats the physical, mental, so...

Q&A: Why are we ignoring rising death rates among poorer ethnic minority children, and will the flesh-and-blood girlfriend become a thing of the past?

28 Nov 2023
00:36:41

New official data in England reveals an alarming and much under-reported phenomenon – significant increases in mortality among children from the most deprived communities over the last two years. What is driving this concerning uptick in the statisti...

Science and religion 1: The myth of conflict, Charles Darwin’s beetle research, epistemic humility, and English country churchyard or Californian fridge?

22 Nov 2023
00:56:57

This week’s guest is Nick Spencer, senior fellow at the faith thinktank Theos, and recent author of Magisteria: The entangled histories of science and religion. Nick joins us to discuss the complicated backstory to how we all came to believe science...

Q&A: The ‘myths’ leading women to choose abortion, and is digital slavery underpinning breakthroughs in AI?

15 Nov 2023
00:38:40

This week we dip back into the postbag to look at some more listener questions. First up we return to our episode looking at recent shifts in abortion rates – is the narrative of ‘it’s my body and I’ll do what I want’ what is truly driving increase...

Friendship 3: Ruth and Naomi, ‘chesed’, trips to the theatre with John Stott, and an unorthodox rabbi

8 Nov 2023
00:53:49

We last tackled the idea of friendship when we explored the so-called ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ – that cloud of concern that today hangs over any close relationship between two people. But friendship in the Bible was not inevitably corrupted by sex,...

The Fall: Bad actor theory, a malevolent voice in the Garden, Total Depravity and Original Sin, and the ‘Christian heresy’ of liberal humanism

1 Nov 2023
00:46:40

Creation. Fall. Redemption. New Creation. This is the grand narrative of scripture and the theological foundation we use to try to probe into the ethical challenges thrown up by advances in science and technology. We looked at creation in September,...

Baby loss 2: Rising abortion numbers, pills by post, ‘the pregnancy remains’, and Schrodinger’s fetus

25 Oct 2023
00:49:13

We spoke last week about the hugely welcome shift in how society talks about miscarriage and cares for women (and men) who have experienced it. And yet at the same time in Britain, we desperately avoid using the same language and narrative establishe...

Baby loss 1: Elsie’s story, one in five pregnancies, names missing from the family tree, and the power of ultrasound

18 Oct 2023
00:37:01

We have just finished Baby Loss Awareness Week here in the UK. While the event is not hugely well known, it is indicative of an enormous cultural shift in recent decades around how society talks about miscarriage and stillbirth. Today, the messaging...

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