Life & Faith

Dr Julie McGonigle led a school community through terrible grief after the traumatic murder of a young women on her staff. Her response and that of the school is worth hearing.
In late 2023, St Andrew’s Cathedral School, right in the heart of Sydney's CBD experienced great tragedy, when a young sports assistant, Lilie James, was murdered by her male colleague and former partner. It rocked the whole of Sydney actually, and was totally heart breaking for the St Andrew's community - students, staff, parents, and alumni.
Head of School, Dr Julie McGonigle, led the community through complex grief and trauma and made a commitment that, when the time was right, the School would lead the way in respectful relationships education.
In early 2024 she began this process by commissioning an international best practice review that involved a whole school, adaptive, participatory change. At the heart of her approach was student co-design which was recently the focus of a report in the Sydney Morning Herald.
This area is of serious concern to all communities trying to educate young people, helping them to cultivate healthy relationships and to develop virtue and good character. Life & Faith invited Dr McGonigle in to talk about that and related education topics.
Explore:
St Andrews Cathedral School

What does your psychologist, teacher, or pastor think about how AI is transforming their job?
“I think we may have created something that will end up shaping us more than we shape it.”
Is AI a revolutionary tool or an existential threat? A watershed moment in human history or an over-hyped bubble? Is it radically enhancing or fundamentally degrading our lives – or neither?
There’s a lot of confident commentary out there, and the CPX team ... has thoughts. But in this episode of Life & Faith, rather than making any pronouncements or predictions, we thought we’d simply go and ask some people to tell us some stories. We reached out to a few friends of CPX in various fields to hear how AI has impacted their work so far, what they’re most keen for or concerned about, and how their pre-existing beliefs and commitments shape what they see when they look at this new(ish) technology.
Listen in to these conversations with psychologist Leisa Aitken, psychiatrist Neil Jeyasingam, school deputy principal Sarah Golsby-Smith, economist and academic Gordon Menzies, and Presbyterian pastor Nathan Campbell on the why, when, and how of both embracing and resisting AI.

The Sexual Revolution freed us from oppressive tradition right? Wrong, says Louise Perry.
Louise Perry is a journalist who has written for many publications, including the New Statesman, the Daily Mail and is now a columnist at the Wall Street Journal. She is the host of the podcast Maiden, Mother, Matriarch.
When she was straight out of university Louise worked in a rape crisis centre and it challenged many of the assumptions she held growing up post the sexual revolution and its notions of unfettered freedom and personal autonomy.
Gradually she came to be disturbed by our hypersexualised culture, that she felt was more loss than gain, especially for women. Her book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, considered the cost of huge social change from the 60s and 70s and modern hook up culture, ubiquitous pornography and an anything goes approach to relationships.
Described as a radical feminist challenge to liberal feminism, the book gave a language to an uneasiness many people felt but weren’t sure why or how to articulate.
Explore:
The Case Against the Sexual Revolution
Bridget Phetasy https://www.phetasy.com/p/slut-regret
Podcast: Maiden, Mother, Matriarch

Loss forces us into barren places. But even there, something new can be born.
When life takes a turn – when you’re diagnosed with a chronic illness, when things spiral out of our control – we're forced into some uncomfortable places. Liminal places.
The word ‘liminal’ comes from the Latin word meaning ‘threshold’ or ‘doorstep’. When you step over a doorway, you cross the dividing line between the inside and outside of a house. A liminal space, then, is a boundary marker between the end of something, and the beginning of something else.
The experience of suffering is one such liminal state in life. It forces us to shed ideas about ourselves that no longer fit our changed circumstances. In this episode of Life & Faith, we bring you the stories of two people who’ve found themselves living lives they weren’t expecting. We explore how they’ve made sense of what has happened to them, and who they are becoming in the process.
Paul Gallagher is an author and journalist who was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 2016. He tells us that the term Multiple Sclerosis means ‘many scars’, and how he’s come to claim that ‘my scars are my human ministry as much as my spiritual ministry’.
Adriel Booker is a speaker and author whose latest book is Tethered to Hope: The Quiet Kindness of God in Crisis, Change, and the Spaces In Between.
This is a conversation about the twists and turns life takes, how crisis changes us, and how it introduces us to the people we didn’t know we were.
EXPLORE
Paul Gallagher’s website, featuring his post ‘How to stay happily married, in under three hours a day’ and why he’s ‘not scared of machines taking over’
Adriel Booker’s website,
Adriel’s book Tethered to Hope: The Quiet Kindness of God in Crisis, Change, and the Spaces In Between
Adriel’s book Grace Like Scarlett: Grieving with Hope after Miscarriage and Loss

John Inazu joins Life & Faith to help us think about how we might live peacefully and productively alongside people with whom deep disagreement is inevitable.
In increasingly, polarised times, the art of disagreeing well is one more of us are going to have to learn. And that is a skill that is not easy to master.
Law Professor John Inazu is an experienced guide in helping people live well in complex, pluralist environments where we mix with those we sometimes profoundly disagree with. How do we navigate contested spaces without descending into conflict and violence? Can we separate a bad idea from the person who holds it? And might we even learn from that person?
His emphasis on the relational aspects of our civic life is especially pertinent.
As a Japanese American whose grandparents were sent to internment camps in World War II, John has a perspective worth hearing on identity, patriotism and the things that can bind a community or a country together.
Explore:
Learning to Disagree: the Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect.
Confident Pluralism: Surviving and Thriving Through Deep Difference