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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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,...
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...
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...
Christianity is sometimes described as ‘bad news for women’. Clearly we would all disagree with this epithet, but why does it have cultural currency right now for a growing number of particularly younger women? In this episode we’re joined by Ellidh...
When the pandemic first spread beyond China there was a straightforward message from scientific elites: the virus came from a wild animal accidentally spilling over into humans, and any suggestion it might have instead been manipulated in a lab and t...
A listener has emailed in to ask where we stand on alternative medicine, such as homeopathy or chiropractors. Is it fine for believers to partake in these kinds of complementary treatments and therapies, alongside traditional evidence-based scientifi...
Today we start a new series unpacking the theological foundations of much of what we talk about on Matters of Life and Death. Many Christians, going back to church fathers, have understood the grand narrative of scripture through a four-part journey:...
