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.
Resuming our conversation with Rhys Laverty from the Davenant Institute, we look at John’s contribution to the Protestant Social Teaching book – a chapter exploring post-Reformation tradition around death and dying. What might medieval and early mode...
Over 150 years the Catholic Church has built up a body of ethical doctrine commonly known as Catholic Social Teaching, which applies Catholic theology to wider social concerns, covering everything from labour relations to contraception. In this episo...
Building on last week’s discussion of AI chatbots, we consider the theology and sociology of why interacting with other human beings is so central to our personhood. But would it matter if we did enter into a counselling or caring relationship with a...
Earlier this year, a Google engineer went public with his concerns an artificial intelligence chatbot program he had been testing had become sentient. Although his fears were dismissed by Google’s bosses, parts of his conversations with the softwar.....
Twenty-four years ago, John published the book which gave this podcast its name: Matters of Life and Death. His first foray into Christian writing and teaching on ethics, it’s now available as an audiobook for the first time which we’re using as an e...
Building on last week’s whistlestop tour through the latest ground-breaking embryo research, in this episode we consider what we should do as Christians about all this. Do we continue to hold onto the position that every embryo is a distinct and prec...
There has been a flood of highly significant if poorly reported developments in embryo research in recent years, all of which raise new and confusing questions for Christians and non-Christians alike. Is it acceptable to use stem cells to create embr...
Our second episode on the evolution debate considers three more bones of contention: where do different species come from? Are we all commonly descended from a single source, or does God intervene? Then we consider homo sapiens, and whether science s...
In this special one-off episode, Tim speaks with Mark Greene from the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity about Queen Elizabeth II, her faith and decades of service. We consider her own particularly Biblical vision for how constitutional m...
Evolution vs creationism. It's been one of the most divisive and contentious debates within Christianity. But is there a way to tackle these questions without falling into rancour and accusation? In this episode we tentatively attempt just that, expl...
Archie’s case underlines the growing crisis over the lack of trust many ordinary people have in medical professionals. Nobody wants to go back to absolute deference to doctors, but is there an alternative to furious hostility and judges having to rul...
Twelve-year-old Archie Battersbee died on 7 August, after months of legal wrangling between doctors who believed he was brain dead and wished to end life support, and his family who resisted this. This tragic case has captured a lot of media attentio...
In this episode we pick up our conversation with clinical geneticist Melody Redman to talk about a new NHS programme in England which is piloting whole genome sequencing of newborn babies. Why are scientists and doctors interested in collecting a chi...
Each of us carries around in our cells about 20,000 different genes – a unique set of biological code which shapes how our bodies develop. As scientists better understand genes and how they work, genetics is becoming a more and more important field o...
Resuming our conversation about suffering, we think through some faithful Christian responses to evil and loss. How can the church reintegrate the deeply Biblical tradition of lament into its corporate and individual life, picking up on the psalms an...
