Matters of Life and Death

Perhaps the most contentious political, medical and social issue of the day is how to treat and care for young people who are questioning or experiencing distress around their sex and gender. We are both away for half-term this week, so we’re bringing you an episode from 2023 when we spoke with Christian community paediatrician Julie Maxwell about the rise in children reporting gender dysphoria, the evidence base behind controversial treatments such as puberty-blockers, and how we as followers of Jesus can speak compassionately and faithfully into the maelstrom of invective and opinion on this important topic.
 
 • You can send in your questions for us to discuss on the podcast, or ideas for future episodes, to [email protected]
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • Find some of Tim's journalism and sign up for free to his weekly church news newsletter The Critical Friend: https://tswyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

In the first part of this episode we talk through a startling new scientific breakthrough: researchers claim they can insert genetic material from an ordinary skin cell into a human egg cell, and then use that to fertilise and grow an embryo. This means an infertile couple or a same-sex couple could theoretically have a child who was genetically related to both parents for the first time. But just because we can, should we be doing this? 
 
 Then we respond to a listener’s question on our recent episode about miraculous faith healing. What did Jesus mean when he told his disciples they would do even greater things than his amazing works? Does this not mean we should expect to surpass Christ’s own miraculous healing ministry? 
 
 • You can send in your questions for us to discuss on the podcast, or ideas for future episodes, to [email protected]
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • Find some of Tim's journalism and sign up for free to his weekly church news newsletter The Critical Friend: https://tswyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

Of all orthodox Christian doctrines, the trinity is perhaps the one which most languishes understudied and underappreciated. Many of us see it as a baffling paradox, a riddle without an answer. Only of interest to egg-headed nerds and without any practical application to day-to-day Christian life. But have we been getting this wrong all along? Could reflecting on what it means to say we believe in one God in three persons actually unlock a whole raft of insight and appreciation for not just who our God – Father, Son and Spirit – but also lots of other elements of Christian belief and practice? 
 
 • You can send in your questions for us to discuss on the podcast, or ideas for future episodes, to [email protected]
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • Find some of Tim's journalism and sign up for free to his weekly church news newsletter The Critical Friend: https://tswyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

It has been hard to miss the ways that right-wing political movements have become marked by Christian rhetoric and language in recent years. Clearly, something about the unstable and fractious era we live in has seen people yearning to turn Western nations back to an imagined Christian past. But is this a mirage, or even an idolatrous worship of the nation state? How should Christians engage in politics in democracies? Is it helpful to think about trying to make a country ‘more Christian’? And what might the gospel have to say beyond our shores to a world where the liberal international rules-based order is collapsing and might makes right once more? This week we discuss all this and more with John Heathershaw, a Christian professor of international relations and former aid worker. 
 
 Find more of John’s writing and his latest book Security After Christendom on his Substack blog: https://johnheathershaw.substack.com 
 
 • You can send in your questions for us to discuss on the podcast, or ideas for future episodes, to [email protected]
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • Find some of Tim's journalism and sign up for free to his weekly church news newsletter The Critical Friend: https://tswyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

Natural disasters like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions have caused untold misery, suffering and death over the centuries. Some, like the infamous Lisbon earthquake and tsunami in 1755, have even been held up as prompting turns away from belief in God entirely. How can believers account for the apparent brokenness and destructiveness of the earth, and yet continue to believe it was made by a good God who declared his creation to be good? Are these deep geological forces actually as bad as many have thought? What about cancer, or other genetic diseases which cause deep suffering and have no human cause? Are they still, mysteriously, somehow caused by human sinfulness? Is it right to think of anything in creation as inherently ‘evil’ at all? Helping us think through these big questions this week is Prof Bob White, a world-renowned geo-physicist who has spent his career trying to better understand place tectonics which cause volcanoes and earthquakes. He’s also emeritus director of the Faraday Institute, a Cambridge-based think tank aiming to bolster the interface between science and Christian faith. 
 
 Find out more about the Faraday Institute, including their long list of resources - https://www.faraday.cam.ac.uk/
 
 • You can send in your questions for us to discuss on the podcast, or ideas for future episodes, to [email protected]
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • Find some of Tim's journalism and sign up for free to his weekly church news newsletter The Critical Friend: https://tswyatt.com 
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

Christians often find themselves disagreeing about what posture to adopt in our increasingly secular and faith-hostile culture. Should we stand apart from society, keeping ourselves unsullied by its godlessness, so we can prophetically call out evil and witness to Christ? Or should we seek to engage deeply in our context, seeing our calling as to shape creation in a kingdom direction, acting incarnationally and incrementally for good? Are we most faithful to the way of Jesus by remaining prophetic outsiders or incarnational insiders? In this episode we discuss this tension and what we might learn from an often overlooked Old Testament passage where two of Yahweh’s followers – each espousing a very different mode of witness – bump into each other unexpectedly in the Judaean desert. 
 
 • You can send in your questions for us to discuss on the podcast, or ideas for future episodes, to [email protected]
 • kSubscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

Artificial Intelligence is everywhere these days, and the hospital, surgery and clinic are no different. It’s getting into wearable tech, it’s assisting in making diagnoses, and much more. There’s a lot of promise, but is there also some peril? What compromises around human connection and compassionate care might we make in our rush to integrate AI into healthcare? How can Christian doctors, nurses and others continue to embody Christlike presence in a world which, more and more, is being shaped by machines, software and computers?
 
 • You can send in your questions for us to discuss on the podcast, or ideas for future episodes, to [email protected] 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

An influential Canadian doctors’ association has proposed expanding the country’s euthanasia laws so newborn babies suffering from serious disabilities could be given lethal drugs for the first time. In light of this, we discuss the often conflicting philosophies that lie behind our medical thinking on the unborn child versus newborn babies. What was so shocking and distinctive about how the early church treated babies so casually discarded by pagan Greco-Roman society? Are we losing this legacy of Christendom as both abortion and euthanasia are pushed ever further forwards? What will it look like in the coming decades for Christians to bear witness to their counter-cultural convictions about the full humanity and dignity of babies? 
 
 Our previous episode on Canada’s euthanasia programme, Medical Assistance in Dying: https://www.johnwyatt.com/how-can-christian-doctors-approach-medically-assisted-dying/ 
 John’s essay on better options for caring for newborn babies with life-limiting or even lethal abnormalities: https://www.johnwyatt.com/essay-palliative-care-for-babies-following-a-diagnosis-of-lethal-fetal-abnormality/ 
 An article exploring further the radical approach early Christians took to newborn children compared to classical culture: https://www.johnwyatt.com/article-neonatal-ethics/ 
 
 • You can send in your own questions for us to discuss on the podcast, or ideas for future episodes, to [email protected]
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

We weren’t able to record an episode this week so please enjoy one from the MOLAD archive: 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 and faith were inevitably at odds with each other. Where did this myth come from, and what is a more nuanced and truthful account of how religion reacted to the emergence of contemporary science in the last 300 years? Should Christians actually welcome a bright dividing line between our world of faith and spirituality, and the hard-nosed world of science, focused solely on a measurable reality of atoms and molecules? And what might we learn from the surprisingly interesting personal religious lives of some of history’s greatest scientists?
 
 Find out more about Nick’s book and how to order it here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Magisteria/Nicholas-Spencer/9780861544615 
 
 • You can send in your own questions for us to discuss on the podcast, or ideas for future episodes, to [email protected]
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

In today’s Q&A episode, we first explore a question sent in about a troubling story from Georgia, USA, where a braindead pregnant woman was kept on life-support for months (against the wishes of her family) in order that once her unborn child had developed sufficiently he could be born alive. The hospital reportedly believed it was compelled to do so thanks to Georgia’s strict anti-abortion laws which they feared would make doctors liable if they’d allowed the mother to fully die, and her then 9-week old fetus with her. 
 Then we return to the issue of vaccines, prompted by another listener’s question. He has many family members not only sceptical of vaccines but convinced they have themselves been seriously harmed by taking covid jabs. What does a loving pastoral response look like here? Beyond battering people over the head with endless statistics and studies, how can we sensitively yet truthfully support those who truly believe they have suffered from vaccines we know are almost entirely safe?
 
 • You can send in your own questions for us to discuss on the podcast, or ideas for future episodes, to [email protected]. 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

A doctor listener has written in with a fascinating question about miraculous healing. It was clearly a major part of Jesus’s ministry in the gospels, and yet she has doubts despite prayer for healing becoming a larger and larger part of her church’s life. Why is it that Jesus healed profound lifelong disabilities immediately and unambiguously, whereas so many healings today seem to be partial, gradual, and mostly concerned with invisible internal maladies which often get better by themselves? The New Testament seems clear we should ask God to heal, and yet many people’s experiences are of unanswered prayers, sometimes stretching over a lifetime. But can it be healthy for Christians to turn their medical brains off at church on a Sunday, only to then switch their faith off when back at work on Monday morning? 
 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

The prominent vaccine sceptic turned US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr is hard at work tearing apart America’s vaccine orthodoxy and establishment. For decades now questions have been raised about a supposed link between the MMR vaccine and autism. And the pandemic turbocharged vaccine hesitancy and the anti-vax movement. So what is the evidence that vaccination protects us from disease without causing us harm? Are the side effects actually so rare? Were corners cut by Big Pharma and the medical establishment in the rush to roll out covid jabs? And why do so many, including Christians, find it hard to trust the mountains of scientific evidence which points to the safety and efficacy of vaccination? Is the church especially fertile soil for conspiracy theories and mistrust of science to grow – and if so, should we be worried about this?
 
 RFK Jr cancels $500m in funding for mRNA vaccines - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c74dzdddvmjo 
 RFK Jr sacks entire US vaccine committee - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyge27y2g9o 
 John’s previous writing and podcasts about vaccines from the covid pandemic - https://www.johnwyatt.com/?s=vaccines 
 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

As we’re on our summer hols, this week we’re bringing you a classic MOLAD episode from the archive. In October, the UK marks Baby Loss Awareness Week. There’s been an enormous cultural shift in recent decades around how society talks about miscarriage and stillbirth. Today, the messaging is much more compassionate and empathetic, acknowledging the reality of the baby who has died and the grief their parents will be feeling. In this episode we explore what prompted this sea change in thinking, what we know about how losing a child affects both parents, and how Christians can bring this welcome shift into the church context as well. We go on to think through the cognitive dissonance in how we still talk about abortion, avoiding the deep empathy we’ve learned about unborn children through miscarriage. How have these two mutually contradictory stories about the unborn child developed side by side? And would it be wrong for pro-life Christians to highlight the incoherent narratives around baby loss in advocacy and campaigning?
 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

For a technology that only really hit the public consciousness barely three years ago, AI is everywhere. Clearly it is useful, maybe even addictive, but can it also be harmful? Should we be concerned, as Christians, as creatives, as human beings even, at what AI is doing to crafts such as artistry, writing and more? No-one is arguing for a total firewall against AI, but is it possible to integrate it thoughtfully into our daily lives and work – welcoming the shortcuts it offers – without it gradually degrading our own intrinsic human God-given spark of creativity? In this episode we talk through these ideas with Caleb Woodbridge, an editor and writer, who recently published an intriguing manifesto about how to hold onto our humanity in the age of AI. 
 
 
 Caleb’s Substack article - https://www.biggerinside.co.uk/p/remaining-human-in-the-age-of-ai 
 His personal website - https://calebwoodbridge.com/ 
 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

Today’s discussion begins with a maverick rival to the Olympics – The Enhanced Games – which will allow all its athletes to use whatever drugs or technology they want to try and boost their performance. It’s garnered a lot of support and investment from both Donald Trump-adjacent right-wing political forces, and techno-optimistic libertarian folk in Silicon Valley. The games themselves will act as a testbed for various kinds of biohacking which wealthy elites hope may one day help them live forever. Human enhancement is close to moving from science fiction to reality, but should we worried? Would you take a pill which could make you run faster, work harder or think smarter? Is there really any difference between using science and tech to make us healthier, and using similar science and tech to make us better than healthy? How might our Christian convictions around the Creator’s intentions or the incarnation of Jesus address these ethical dilemmas? 
 
 The Bloomberg article on the Enhanced Games which partly inspired our discussion – https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-06-27/the-enhanced-games-aims-to-be-an-olympics-where-doping-is-the-point 
 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

In this Q&A episode we begin with a query from a listener who is agonising over whether to apply for work at a defence research institution. Can believers, even those who hold to just war theory, spend their careers helping create better ways for soldiers to kill? How can we know what God’s will for our lives are in general?
 Then we move to a second question about a concerning story: a family using at-home DNA tests accidentally discovered their late father was not biologically related to them, and instead had been swapped for another family’s baby when a newborn in an NHS maternity ward 80 years ago. Should we be wary of taking these kind of DNA tests, afraid of what unintended consequences may flow? How should Christians approach our society’s increasingly DNA-obsessed thinking about family and kinship? 
 
 We always joked dad looked nothing like his parents - then we found out why https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gexw7l7rwo 
 
 [Correction: Around 6 minutes in, Tim says that the Church of England does not exclude from its investments arms manufacturers, but this is actually wrong. Their ethical rules do prohibit investing in companies if they sell arms unless it’s only a very small proportion of their overall business: https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2024-09/defence-advice.pdf]
 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

In just his second day in the job, the new Pope Leo XIV dropped a fascinating hint as to what his priorities may be in the Vatican. It turns out he chose his name to honour the last Pope Leo XIII, who issued a famous and highly significant teaching document back in 1893. This not only laid out a new pro-worker approach from the Catholic Church at the height of the industrial revolution upending Western society, it also set the foundations of what has become Catholic Social Teaching. Now, the new Pope Leo has said the church’s social teaching may be needed for a fresh industrial revolution – one powered not by steam engines but artificial intelligence. To untangle what on earth he might mean, we are joined this week by Catholic theologian and Pope Leo XIII expert Luke Arredondo. 
 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

Last week we set the historical context of abortion law in the UK and how a sudden imposition of decriminalised abortion in 2019 in Northern Ireland set a precedent for what happened here in England a few weeks ago. But it’s hard to imagine the situation we have today also without the covid pandemic, which pro-abortion activists used skilfully to accelerate their plans to liberalise Britain’s abortion regime. How did the pills by post telemedicine abortions introduced during the lockdown lead to our present situation, where a small number of women are being unprecedentedly prosecuted and even imprisoned for aborting late-term fetuses? And presuming decriminalisation does pass the House of Lords and become law, what on earth should Christians and the church do in response? Is the answer more strident advocacy, prayer, or social action to reduce demand for abortion in the first place?
 
 Dawn McAvoy leads the Both Lives initiative from the Evangelical Alliance, find out more here - https://www.eauk.org/what-we-do/initiatives/both-lives/about 
 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

Without basically any public debate or meaningful legislative scrutiny, MPs in parliament passed a major reform to Britain’s abortion laws last week. Decriminalisation now means mothers cannot be prosecuted for aborting their unborn children all the way up to birth. This radical change has caught many onlookers on the hop – where has this come from? What will it change in practice? Why is it happening? Wasn’t abortion already legal in England? This week we’re joined by Dawn McAvoy from the campaign group Both Lives to try and track the history of abortion policy in the UK and how we got to a point whereby the de facto legalisation of abortion on demand all the way up to 40 weeks could be rammed through parliament in less than an hour. We look at the changing scope of abortion law, the shifting justifications used whenever the law is changed, and how decriminalisation was effectively piloted in Northern Ireland over the heads of its own lawmakers to pave the way for last week’s reforms in England. 
 Come back next week for the second half of our conversation, covering the critical if unforeseen role of the covid pandemic and the pills by post scheme, as well as a closing discussion of how Christians and the church could respond to these developments. 
 
 Find out more about Both Lives - https://www.eauk.org/what-we-do/initiatives/both-lives/about 
 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

This week we’re joined by the writer and podcaster Elizabeth Oldfield. Her new book Fully Alive is a series of essays trying to introduce riches of the Christian tradition and its wisdom on everything from feminism to loneliness to non-believers who may have never considered Christianity before. We discuss trying to tap into what many see as a crisis of meaning and associated new openness to faith in culture. Is there really, beyond the tiny intellectual elite debating these ideas, a genuine curiosity and yearning for spiritual answers to life’s biggest questions among ordinary people? Elizabeth also lives in a 21st-century monastic-style community house in South London, and we drill into how sharing your home, money and life with another family can possibly work – and the costs and benefits of radical early church-style hospitality.
 
 Find out more about Elizabeth and her book, podcast and newsletter at www.elizabetholdfield.com
 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

Tim is on holiday, so today we’re bringing you a classic episode from the MOLAD archive. 
 The persecuted church today lives as it always has under the threat of arrest, imprisonment, physical attack, verbal threats and harassment, and even death. But today these traditional methods are supplemented by the technological revolution. Increasingly persecution comes via the internet, on social media platforms, and sometimes even via the smart devices Christians use themselves. How do oppressive regimes and anti-Christian extremists use modern tech to persecute believers? What impact does this new form of pervasive digital surveillance have on underground churches? And how can those of us worshipping in safety and freedom try to resist a future of global coercion and repression for vulnerable Christians facilitated by multinational tech companies? 
 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

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 Cook, a student worker in central London whose theological studies focused on violence against women in the Old Testament, to discuss how she goes about showing women our faith is actually lifegiving for both sexes. Where might the church have gone wrong in its efforts to put Biblical teaching into practice? Should believers be feminists? What does that word even mean today? And what hope can the authentic gospel of Jesus Christ offer the stressed, anxious, confused and exploited young women of our 21st century societies? 
 - Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 - If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 - For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

Today we’re sharing an episode of the Faith in Parenting podcast, run by the Faith in Kids team, which we took part in some months ago. We were kindly asked on to chat about being Christians and being parents, and in particular how we handle sometimes tricky questions and issues that come up from the natural world and in science. And Tim got to share the good and the bad bits of being raised by John, and how science and sex and bodies and dinosaurs and everything else got handled in the home. 
 
 You can find out more about Faith in Kids and subscribe to their podcast here - https://www.faithinkids.org/podcasts/ 
 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

It’s hard to escape the fact that we live in gloomy, despairing times. Whether it is economic stagnation, pandemics, democracy under attack, unending wars or the climate crisis, more and more people feel like things are falling apart. That maybe even the world is coming to a depressing end. How did things get this hopeless, given the relatively recent optimism and energy of the past? Must Christians by default oppose this kind of despair, and what does the Bible have to say about watching the signs of the times? And given apocalypse literally means a time of uncovering and revealing, what should we have our eyes open to in this season of revelation? 
 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

In the first part of today’s episode we look at some exciting new research into treatments for the degenerative brain condition Parkinsons’s disease. We’ve known since the 1980s that transplants of brain tissue can slow the disease, but the only source was from the brains of embryos created during IVF. Now, scientists have shown they can create stem cells in the lab which can be coached to grow into the right brain tissue by itself before transplant. Could this be an ethical breakthrough, allowing a radical new Parkinson’s treatment without destroying embryos in the process? 
 In the second half, we think about a question sent in by a listener – why do so many doctors seem committed to futile overtreatment of the elderly in their final years and months? How did the medical profession get stuck into a ‘if in doubt, treat, and always follow the protocol’ culture, and what can Christians who want to avoid needless overtreatment as they die do to prevent this? 
 
 Read more on the Parkinson’s research - https://singularityhub.com/2025/04/17/parkinsons-patients-say-their-symptoms-eased-after-receiving-millions-of-new-brain-cells
 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

Is there an element of the gospel which we’ve forgotten about? That Jesus came not to just to deal with the guilt of our sin and forgive that, but to deal with the shame of being sinners and to cover that too. In this episode we dig into the differences between shame-honour cultures and guilt-forgiveness cultures. So-called honour killings, when family members murder their own kin to end their supposed shaming of the family, baffle and repulse us in the West, and yet Jesus came to a context in first century Judaea which was profoundly honour-based. How can we re-examine the gospel message he brought in this light to see what our profoundly individualistic culture in the West might have missed? And, are things starting to shift in both secular society and the church in recent times, as we drift towards a new form of shame-honour culture driven by cancellation and public shaming via social media? 
 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

Two major Supreme Court rulings here in the UK have given us plenty to chew over in this episode. In the first half we explore a judgement about doctors caught up in controversial and tragic life support legal disputes with the parents of deeply ill children. The judges ruled that there should not be automatic anonymity given to these doctors and that they can be named by parents angry that the hospital staff looking after their kids decided it was not in their interests to keep them on life support. Is this a victory for the conservative Christian campaigners who believe the NHS system is too quick to give up on terminally ill children?
 The same day the Supreme Court also handed down a judgement about the definition of a woman, ruling that sex in the pivotal anti-discrimination law the 2010 Equality Act meant solely biological sex. Therefore, trans women, even those who have been legally recognised by the state as having transitioned gender, do not need to given access to single-sex female spaces such as prisons, changing rooms and women’s refuges. In the second half, we discuss the implications of this ruling – is it a welcome return to embracing the bodies our Creator gave us? 
 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

‘Granny’s body remains, but she is 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 humanity and identity is inextricably bound up in our physical flesh and bones, how should we approach the heart-breaking challenge of caring for someone declining into dementia? In this episode from the podcast vault (we are away over Easter) we speak with vicar and theologian Jess Wyatt (yes, also Tim’s wife and John’s daughter-in-law, it’s a real family affair) about her research into embodiment, personhood and dementia, and think through different ways to care for and attend to those suffering from this increasingly prevalent disease.
 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

Graham Tomlin has been a vicar, a theologian, a college principal, a bishop and now spearheads a project dedicated to trying to re-enchant the UK with Christian faith. In this episode we reflect with him about his ministry, the current state and status of theology in the church, the struggles of the Church of England where he served as a bishop until recently, and why he’s now focusing on helping non-churchgoers begin to see the world through ‘Christian spectacles’.
 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

One fringe explanation for the fall in birthrates we discussed in last week’s episode is the growing popularity of the antinatalist movement. Antinatalists argue not just that people should be free to not have children if they want to, but that having children is in itself a bad idea. Antinatalists can be motived by many things: concerns over climate change, the ecological crisis, fears about overpopulation and lack of resources on our finite Earth, or even more philosophical notions around the inevitability of suffering or the problem of bringing children into the world without first seeking their consent. It’s easy to dismiss antinatalism as foolish or bizarre, but is there any logic or merit to this perspective? Is Christianity fundamentally a pro-natalist religion, or can believers be justified in choosing not to have children? And what about the honoured tradition of celibacy and voluntary childlessness in church history – is that a form of Christian antinatalism we should be getting behind once more?
 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

With unerring regularity, birth rates are dropping in almost every country on Earth. What was once assumed to be a rich world problem is now a reality in places as diverse as Chile, Russia, Thailand and the Caribbean. Almost everywhere people are having fewer and fewer children. Many nations, including the UK and the US, are now well below the magic number of 2.1 children per woman, the ‘replacement rate’ needed to maintain a stable population. In this episode we talk through the various theories proposed to explain why this is happening (is it about expensive childcare, birth control or cultural shifts in gender roles?) and also what the implications will be for our societies. And we end by discussing whether Christians should be joining those sounding the alarm about declining birth rates, and what our faith might have to say about the enduring value of having children. 
 
 Several years ago we recorded a couple of episodes exploring the parallel phenomenon of rising numbers of older people https://www.johnwyatt.com/old-people-1/
 
 Some helpful data on global birth rates in decline https://ourworldindata.org/global-decline-fertility-rate 
 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

The non-religious are an ever-increasing segment of the population, in the UK, the United States and across the Western world. But what do they actually believe, and indeed not believe, in? In this classic episode from the MOLAD archive we’re joined by evangelist and author Glen Scrivener to discuss the different spiritualities we encounter, especially among younger generations. Are all non-believers Richard Dawkins style naturalistic atheists, or is there a more complex and contradictory set of belief systems out there for those who don’t call themselves Christians? How should the church’s outreach shift to reflect the contemporary mores of Gen-Z and the pick-and-mix spiritualities they often espouse? And are modern social movements, whether ‘woke’ or ‘anti-woke’ functioning like religions without creeds?
 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

Somewhat unnoticed by many in the British church, in the last few years the UK has imposed draconian new laws which can in some circumstances curtail fundamental religious liberties. In the name of protecting people from intimidating pro-life protests, 150-metre buffer zones now exist around every clinic and hospital which performs abortions in the UK. Inside these zones you can be arrested for doing anything which is deemed to influence women accessing abortion services – but these vague laws have seen a number of Christian pro-lifers arrested simply for standing in silence praying in their heads, or preaching generic gospel messages unrelated to abortion. How did we get to a place where the freedom to express your religion in public is under threat? Are buffer zones a reasonable provision to clamp down on harmful and aggressive fundamentalists? Or are we sleepwalking into a place where basic religious freedoms are accidentally being eroded, and few in the church seem to notice or care?
 
 Tim’s newsletter The Critical Friend has covered this story a number of times: https://tswyatt.substack.com/p/silent-prayers-inside-the-buffer?utm_source=publication-search and https://tswyatt.substack.com/p/normal-for-norfolk 
 
 The Bournemouth case cited by JD Vance in his infamous speech h https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g9kp7r00vo 
 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

An under-reported story of the tumultuous first months of the second Donald Trump administration is how his team are brutally cutting back long-established federal institutions. The National Institutes of Health and the US Agency for International Development have seen huge swathes of staff fired, grants paused, funding slashed and projects reliant on government aid abruptly shuttered. This is already having massive consequences downstream, both in research into devastating diseases and in humanitarian work with some of the poorest and most vulnerable people on Earth. Why should Christians care about these federal bureaucracies and what Trump is doing to them? Isn’t this just about trimming away woke excesses and focusing on excellence? And what might be lost, including for the church, if the US government gives up on medical research and international development for good? 
 
 The Washington Post has a good article exploring the destruction and chaos at the NIH: https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025/03/05/nih-trump-turmoil-grants/ 
 And this New York Times article explains the devastation wrought by the almost total shut-down by USAID https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/health/usaid-clinical-trials-funding-trump.html?searchResultPosition=2 
 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

AI-driven chatbots are becoming a major industry, with hundreds of millions of people spending hours every day talking to non-human personas. They can be friends, therapists, lovers, work colleagues or fantastical invented characters. Or even an uncanny replica of an actual loved who has died. But should we be worried about the rise of AI chatbots? What does it tell us about human intelligence and personality that it is becoming possible for computers to so accurately mimic us? What might be lost by getting enmeshed in relationships of various kinds with a non-human artificial personality, rather than other embodied, image-bearing human beings? 
 
 John gave the 2024 John Stott London Lecture on this topic, and goes in more detail into some of the ideas we discuss in this episode here: https://www.johnwyatt.com/lecture-authentic-relationships-in-an-artificial-world/
 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

Can a pro-life Christian anaesthetist take part in surgical abortions, even if they are simply ensuring the mother is safely put under and do not do the actual abortion? What about the nurse checking blood pressure earlier on the ward? Or the porter wheeling the mother into theatre? Or the person who made the scalpel? In this episode, prompted by a question from an anaesthetist listener wrestling with this precise dilemma, we try to think through the theological problem of ‘co-operation with evil’. To what extent, if at all, can believers do things which enmesh them with other people’s wrong deeds? What did Jesus mean by ‘render to Caesar what is Caesar’s’? Is it ever possible to maintain our Christian integrity in our fallen and ever more interconnected world? How can we decide where to draw the lines? 
 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

Due to illness, we weren’t able to record a new episode this week, so instead here’s one from the Matters of Life and Death archive you might enjoy. So-called memecoins – new cryptocurrencies launched solely as tongue-in-cheek speculative online investment assets – have boomed in recent months. Back in 2023 we were joined by Christian tech writer and Baptist minister Chris Goswami to try to unpick how we should feel as believers about cryptocurrencies. What is bitcoin, and is it any different to previous internet-based tech industries we could invest in which have boomed and gone bust over the years? Are they providing financial liberation for some of the poor and excluded communities in the developing world, or simply luring vulnerable under-educated people into shady scams? And how can we grow in wisdom and discernment as believers so that we can pick our way through this wildly accelerating field of technological advancement, avoiding what is harmful while pursuing the good?
 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

Elon Musk, the mercurial billionaire who owns Twitter, is increasingly wielding his enormous political power via his social media network, interfering in politics in America and far beyond. Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg, owner of Facebook, has tried to align his business with the new regime in Washington by abolishing fact-checking. Should we be alarmed at where social media is going in the 2020s, with populist right-wing movements leveraging their online influence in very real offline consequences? Can Christians continue to use their platforms, or should we join the progressive exodus to alternative sites? And how can we work out who to trust and where to get our news from in this confusing post-truth, post-legacy media world? 
 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

Recent research by the abortion provider BPAS has uncovered a striking increase in the numbers of women who use fertility tracking apps as contraception, rather than the more traditional hormonal pill, coil or implant. And, perhaps most interestingly, there has also been sharp rise in women using no contraception of any kind. In this episode we revisit our last conversation on contraception (linked below) with Dawn McAvoy from the “pro-women pro-life” movement Both Lives, and reconsider why so many women today are turning away from hormonal contraception. Several generations on from the introduction of the Pill, what have been the consequences for society and the church? What are the ethical risks for Christians who believe life begins at conception? Do these fertility-tracking apps actually work, or are they just exploiting ignorance and vague notions of wellness? 
 
 BPAS research on contraception methods: https://srh.bmj.com/content/early/2025/01/01/bmjsrh-2024-202573 
 A BBC News article reporting the study: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c391nlxrv4vo and women’s responses: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c93lq2w5n44o 
 Our last episode exploring contraception: https://www.johnwyatt.com/should-christians-abandon-contraception/ 
 
 Dawn leads Both Lives, part of the Evangelical Alliance: https://www.eauk.org/what-we-do/initiatives/both-lives 
 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

A recent Guardian article looked in depth at advances in neonatology – the care of extremely premature babies – and the complex ethical challenges now faced by parents and doctors alike. Modern medicine can now save the lives of babies born at just 21 or 22 weeks old, but does this come at too great a cost? How are we supposed to decide which babies to throw the full weight of neonatal intensive care at, and which ones cannot be saved? Can Christian parents ever countenance not trying to save a premature baby’s life and instead accept their inevitable death? And what are the Christian roots of the revolution in neonatology in recent years, and how might it be under threat from other competing worldviews present in medicine today? 
 
 ‘Look, they’re getting skin!’: are we right to strive to save the world’s tiniest babies? – https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/nov/19/look-theyre-getting-skin-the-moral-challenge-of-saving-the-worlds-tiniest-babies The Guardian article which prompted this episode is well worth reading.
 
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 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

Advances in reproductive medicine in the past half century have meant it is entirely possible for as many as five different adults to be involved in the birth of one child (sperm and egg donors, a surrogate mother who carries the fetus, and the commissioning parents who will raise them, and paid for everyone else). In this maelstrom of competing claims, the state and courts in many countries have been forced to step in and begin to regulate and define identity and kinship for these new children, as procreation gets messily broken down into its constituent parts. In this episode we consider a provocative essay by a legal philosopher who explores the troubling implications of this new reality, and ask as Christians where do we stand on the question: who do children belong to? What is lost when children come into the world not inescapably rooted in one family, but as the result of a commercial transaction? How does adoption, generally held in honour by most believers, differ from surrogacy arrangements increasingly pursued by wider society? 
 
 The essay by Jeff Shafer which prompted this conversation: https://mcrawford.substack.com/p/to-whom-do-children-belong 
 Our previous episode on surrogacy from 2023: https://www.johnwyatt.com/surrogacy/ 
 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

Since 2010 mental health problems among young people have exploded. At precisely the same time, smartphones and social media have become deeply embedded in the lives of children and teenagers. A growing body of evidence suggests these two things are connected. In this episode we consider the argument that a turn away from physical outdoor play towards spending endless hours scrolling and messaging via screens is hugely detrimental to the wellbeing of young people. And if this is true, why has it happened, and what can we do about it? What resources might the church and Christian faith have to bear on this problem? Do we need to radically retool our own church culture to become havens of disconnection and embodied in-person community? Or this just another moral panic at the advent of a new form of technology?
 
 The Anxious Generation, by Jonathan Haidt - https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/book 
 Haidt’s Substack newsletter After Babel is also worth reading, including his recent post using documents from court cases against TikTok - https://www.afterbabel.com/p/industrial-scale-harm-tiktok 
 Australia is trying to implement a world-first ban on social media for under-16s - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c89vjj0lxx9o 
 Some towns are trying out shared pledges from parents to stay smartphone-free - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg2r4rxjd9o 
 Our previous episode with Andy Crouch discussing Haidt’s research and Crouch’s own writing on how to cultivate tech-wise Christian households - https://pod.link/1509923173/episode/515cca3cfe50794d7e60d1e0d753f86a 
 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

A movement founded at the University of Oxford in 2009 has now captured the imagination – and the wallets – of some of the brightest and most successful across elite Western academic and business circles. Effective altruism, a 21st-century data-driven take on the philosophy of utilitarianism, claims we must give our time and money only to those causes which can be proven to increase the greatest amount of pleasure to the most people. Why has this eccentric community grown so fast, has it become unmoored from its original intentions, and what perverse incentives arise when we try to distil ethics into an algorithm? We then go on to explore the Christian sub-community within EA and ask whether the movement’s fundamental ideas are compatible with Christian tradition on giving. Is Christian EA a welcome challenge to our increasingly sentimental and selfish modes of charity, or has it actually missed the point on the nature of God?
 
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 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

Every tap, swipe and click we make on our phones, tablets and laptops is being recorded by big tech firms. This is often called surveillance capitalism – a network of products and services we use every day which sucks up large quantities of data about us and then sells it on to advertisers at huge profits. It’s garnering increasing concern from citizens and regulators around the world, but should we care as Christians? Why have tech companies made their products so addictively hard to put down and stop tapping, swiping and clicking? In this episode we think through more of the implications of living in a non-private digital village in the 21st century, and we also ponder the implications of the more deceptive and destructive aspects of addictive digital technologies. What are some initial efforts believers have made to carve out space for family time and spirituality in our disembodied always-on world.
 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

While we are away over the Christmas break, here’s a classic episode from the Matters of Life and Death vault. 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 embryo-like structures to research on? Should we ban all efforts to perfect gene editing, even if that stops us effectively eradicating some horrible conditions? And would it be wise to extend the current rules on embryo research to let scientists go further in the lab, as many would like? In this episode we wrestle with how Christians can handle the dizzying pace and confusion of scientific development in this field, to continue to make good ethical choices even at some personal cost. 
 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

Many evangelical Christians remain uncomfortable about engaging with the Biblical narrative, in both Old and New Testaments, around evil, Satan, spiritual forces and demonic power. And even more so in trying to identify their malign hand behind modern trends. But in this episode we reconsider what scripture says – and doesn’t say – about the nature of evil and ungodly spiritual forces, the powers and principalities of our world. How have theologians connected the “lordless” powers the Bible warns us against with modern institutions, technologies and ideas? Is it naïve to expect an industry as unprecedently wealthy and powerful as Silicon Valley to be immune from the deceitful and manipulative influence of personal evil? Are powerful new technologies like the internet or generative AI really just neutral tools, only as dangerous as the people using them? And, how can the church learn to be more sceptical and thoughtful about power and how it is exercised in our current societies? 
 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

This week’s episode picks up on our last conversation with paediatrician Julie Maxwell from 2023, and in particular the sweeping changes made to how gender-questioning children are treated in Britain in the last year. A weighty official report by an eminent doctor concluded that the NHS’s sole clinic for gender medicine should be shut down and the practice of treating young people with puberty-blocking medication abandoned entirely. We talk through the implications of the Cass Report, whether a return to evidence-based medicine instead of political ideology is really breaking out, and what the situation is in the education system, where culture wars over trans children continue to rage. How on earth can Christian parents navigate this fast-changing and very divisive issue with compassion and faithfulness? 
 
 Julie’s article for Affinity on ‘Christian parenting in a confusing world of gender identity’: https://www.affinity.org.uk/social-issues/christian-parenting-in-a-confusing-world-of-gender-identity/
 Julie also recommends for Christians interested in this topic: 
 The Gender Revolution, by Patricia Weerakoon https://uk.10ofthose.com/product/9781925424973/the-gender-revolution-paperback 
 Time To Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children, by Hannah Barnes https://amzn.eu/d/77taYWm
 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

MPs in the House of Commons passed Kim Leadbeater’s assisted suicide bill last week. It will be several years before Britons are able to ask their doctors to help them kill themselves, but it is a totemic moment nonetheless – the first time Parliament has endorsed the concept of assisted suicide. In this episode we discuss what the bill proposes, the campaign that built up to the debate, how MPs discussed and voted on the bill, and what happens now. Is there any scope for damage limitation in the next committee and amendment stages of the legislation, before it comes into effect? And what should the church be doing to prepare Christians for this stark new reality, to disciple believers about why suicide is not the best way to end a life? Or, are some Christians wildly overreacting to what is a disappointing but relatively minor social reform?
 
 Read John’s detailed report on the Leadbeater bill, sent to all MPs before the debate, here: https://www.johnwyatt.com/leadbeaterbill/ 
 Find the rest of his resources on assisted suicide and euthanasia here: https://www.johnwyatt.com/in-focus/assisted-suicide-and-euthanasia/ 
 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

While most Protestant Christians have been at ease with using contraception for generations, there is a growing movement to re-examine the ethics of this, with more and more evangelicals asking if perhaps their Catholic brothers and sisters may have a point. At the same time, increasing numbers of women in society more broadly are turning away from hormonal contraception, believing its physical and mental side effects to no longer be worth it. In this episode we explore the history of the pill and the church’s evolving thinking on birth control. And we dive into the complicated ethics too. If you believe life begins at conception, can contraception sometimes amount of unintentional abortion? Does it make sense to reject chemical or physical barrier contraception, while still believing the rhythm method is fine? And what does it mean to ensure the procreative and unitive aspects of sex remain central to a Christian marriage?
 
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 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com

Christians normally explain away human-caused suffering by pointing to God giving us free will, and our sinful natures using that to harm ourselves and each other. But what about all the things entirely out of our control which cause so much sadness, from natural disasters to genetic diseases? In this episode we interview apologist and neuroscientist Sharon Dirckx about the origins of evil and how Christians can sensitively respond to objections to faith based in suffering. And, we consider the role of apologetics in general – should we still be doing traditional proclamational evangelism centred on knocking down intellectual objections to faith at all, or is that a 20th-century approach which no longer cuts through?
 
 You can find more about Sharon, including her latest book Broken Planet, at her website: dirckx.org. 
 
 • Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
 • If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John's website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
 • For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com