God Forbid

The White House has a cage fight on the Whitehouse front lawn while, somewhere, a father rose at 3am to feed a crying baby.    
In 2026, what does it mean to be a good father, or a good man? 
Does God, or any religious tradition, see men as something distinct? Or is “be a good man” just “be a good person”? 
The manosphere claims religious sanction. Is that a corruption of these traditions, or an expression of them? 
Three fathers, three frameworks. What do you or can you actually hand onto your son?
GUESTS:
Rev Dr Michael Jensen is an Anglican minister, an Oxford theologian, and a father of four. He’ll tell you God has a design for men — but hear him out, because I reckon it’s not what you’re expecting.
A/Prof Adis Duderija is a scholar of Islam and gender at Griffith University — an expert on how his own tradition understands the rights and responsibilities of manhood. That too is more nuanced than its given credit for. And a father to two teenagers.
Zac Seidler is a psychologist who studies what young men actually watch online. He’s professor at Orygen, Australia's Centre of Excellence in Youth Mental Health. And, as of this year, a brand-new dad.

Do to a dog what we do to a factory-farmed pig, and you’d be arrested. 
Do it to ten thousand pigs in a shed, and it’s breakfast. 
Most of us say cruelty to animals is wrong. 
And then most of us are happy to have them killed and eat them. 
Both our panellists think the way we treat animals is a moral catastrophe. 
But they get there by opposite roads. One says animals matter because they suffer. The other says they matter because they’re God’s creatures. 
GUESTS:
Peter Singer
Emeritus Professor of Bioethics, Princeton University. Host of the podcast Lives Well Lived. 50 years ago exactly, his book Animal Liberation launched the modern animal liberation movement as we know it.
David Clough
Professor of Theology and Applied Sciences, University of Aberdeen. Author of the two-volume work On Animals. He’s a Methodist Preacher and Co-founder of CreatureKind which aims to transform Christian attitudes and practices toward animals.

We are, it turns out, a species that refuses to believe its own birth certificate. 
Australia is ageing, fast. This is not new here, or in Europe and North America where the trend has existed for decades. 
But even in China and now India, the fertility rate has dropped below replacement levels – even the two most populous nations on earth are getting older.  
Yet we’ve built a world — our economies, our cities, our pension systems, our cultures — around the young and the productive. So, what happens when that's no longer who we are? 
GUESTS:
Prof Paul Komesaroff is a philosopher at Monash University. And a practising endocrinologist. And Director of the Centre for Ethics in Medicine and Society.  
Dr Lee-Fay Low is Professor in Ageing and Health at University of Sydney. She’s also a registered psychologist and chairs the Sydney Dementia Network.

You heard that someone had come unstuck. A rival. A bully. Someone overconfident, or two-faced, or just a bit too pleased with themselves. And something in you was glad. 
You won't say it out loud. You might barely admit it to yourself. 
But the Germans have a word for it. And it turns out, so did the ancient Greeks. 
Schadenfreude. The pleasure we take in others' misfortune. 
Is it a moral failing? A sign of deficient character? Or is it a window into what we actually believe about justice, equality — and each other?
GUESTS:
Tiffany Watt-Smith is a cultural historian and author of Schadenfreude: The Joy of Another's Misfortune. She joins us from London. 
Nick Haslam is Professor of Psychology at the University of Melbourne, and the man who's been thinking hard about Australia's national variant — tall poppy syndrome.

Whether or not you believe in - or even know about "the Rapture", "the Tribulation", "the End Times", and "Armageddon", your life is influenced by the idea that Jesus Christ will not only return, he’ll go to Jerusalem, and from there, for exactly one thousand years, he’ll rule the world. 
Yet, this concept is not in the Bible...at least not directly. 
But a bible, published in America in 1909, and written by an American made it the most influential concepts in American Christian fundamentalism.
The story of the Scofield Reference Bible is an extraordinary one. 
Not least because it lies at the heart of Christian Zionism which is more consequential today than ever.  
GUESTS:
Professor Donald Akenson is from Queen's University in Ontario, his latest book The Americanization of the Apocalypse: Creating America's Own Bible.
Dr Robyn Whitaker is Associate Professor of New Testament at Melbourne’s University of Divinity – among her titles Revelation for Normal People.