Matters of Life & Death

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:...

Our latest episode tackling questions from the listeners starts by considering whether we can harmonise a belief in modern science and a literalistic reading of the Genesis account of creation. Did God really create the universe in six days only 6,00...

Britain has been gripped by horror by the recent conviction of a neonatal nurse called Lucy Letby, who murdered seven premature babies and attempted to kill six others at the hospital where she worked. In this episode we discuss this horrifying and t...

We have another episode of listener questions today. First, we respond to feedback from a listener with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (also known as ME) who queried how we spoke about the condition in our previous episode touching on Long Covid. What exac...

This week we have another classic episode of Matters of Life and Death from the archive. We invited theologian Andrew Davison to join us to talk through the spiritual ramifications of cosmology and what light thinking about the wider universe sheds o...

Evolution versus creationism is the internal Christian argument which doesn’t go away. We recorded an episode last year exploring this knotty problem and how believers might go about trying to debate it respectfully even if they disagree. We look at...

It’s been almost two years since we recorded an episode about abusive church leadership inspired by the downfall of Mark Driscoll and the Mars Hill church. Today we re-examine that conversation in the light of the latest scandal rocking the British e...

We’re bringing you a classic episode of Matters of Life and Death from the archive today, all about suffering. The problem of suffering has been one of the most intractable and painful theological debates for centuries. But is it perhaps not a proble...

In our latest episode tackling some questions from listeners, we begin by thinking about whether it should matter if influential theologians and Christian writers had personal moral failings, and whether we can separate out someone’s theological work...

Our second ‘lessons learned’ episode looking back at the covid pandemic tackles how our healthcare systems coped, or failed to cope, with the unprecedented crisis of coronavirus. Did we see doctors forced to make impossible choices over who gets a ve...

This podcast happened to launch a week or two into the first lockdown in spring 2020, and so for the first year almost all we could talk about on the show was coronavirus. But since normality finally returned last year, it feels like nobody wants to...

‘Granny’s body remains, but she was gone’. The public narrative around dementia often presumes that as our ability to talk, move and think gradually withers away, so does our personhood and sense of self. But if we believe as Christians that our huma...