Spiritual Misfits Podcast

Caro and Will had been talking about wanting more younger voices on the pod. That same week, Emelia Haskey filled out the Spiritual Misfits listener survey and offered to come on.
Emelia is 25. She grew up Catholic in Adelaide, went to a high school run by Dominican nuns, and walked away from the institution as a teenager. Then, at the end of a journalism degree, while organising with left-wing groups on campus, she came across liberation theology, reread the gospels, and had her heart strangely warmed by the Beatitudes. Five years on, she’s a candidate for ministry in the Uniting Church and works with both teenagers and young adults.
So what do young people actually want from church? Emelia gives us her perspective on this question and others in this wide-ranging conversation about Gen Z spirituality, different expressions of church, and the cultural moment we find ourselves in.
 
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Poet and host of Poetry Unbound  Pádraig Ó Tuama joins Caro for a conversation we're sharing on the same day his new collection, Love Between Men, is released.
Pádraig and Caro talk about being a misfit across Catholic, charismatic and ecumenical Christianity, and about why belonging isn’t always a good thing. They discuss reading the Bible as art and argument rather than rulebook, and why the word “nothing” has become a loving word for God in Pádraig’s writing. 

Pádraig reflects on the exorcisms and reparative therapy he went through in his twenties, and on the poems he later wrote in response. He also talks about learning to make friends with anger, and about how to write, or simply notice, when the world and your own life both feel like a polycrisis.
Along the way he reads poems, including “F*cked Up Families of the Bible,” “The Exorcist,” and “Our Lady of the Garden.”
Content note: this episode includes discussion of conversion therapy and exorcism, and contains strong language.
Connect with Pádraig's work here:
https://www.padraigotuama.com/

Get Pádraig's new book 'Love Between Men' here:
https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/books/love-between-men-by-padraig-o-tuama/

Want to reach out and let us know your thoughts or suggestions for the show? Send us a message here; we’d love to hear from you.
The Spiritual Misfits Survival Guide (FREE): https://www.spiritualmisfits.com.au/survivalguide

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How do you know when it’s time to leave a community you love but no longer believe in? And what happens when your body knows before your mind does?
Steve Schallert grew up the child of missionaries in a quiet, Quaker-ish corner of Germany, found Jesus through the radical peace activist Daniel Berrigan at 19, and then spent a decade inside YWAM, an organisation he says he never really agreed with. In this honest and generous conversation, Steve shares why he never “deconstructed,” what it cost him to finally walk away, and how he’s learning that the healing of the world and the healing of ourselves are the same work.
Mentioned in this episode: Daniel Berrigan, the Catholic Worker movement, the Plowshares movement, Ched Myers, Dom Hélder Câmara, Community Peacemaker Teams (formerly Christian Peacemaker Teams), Parker Palmer, St. Stephen’s University, and Steve’s podcast, Good on Wood.
Want to reach out and let us know your thoughts or suggestions for the show? Send us a message here; we’d love to hear from you.
The Spiritual Misfits Survival Guide (FREE): https://www.spiritualmisfits.com.au/survivalguide

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What does a 2,000-year-old book about a talking statue have to say about ChatGPT? And can AI form us, or only perform for us?
Pope Leo XIV chose artificial intelligence as the subject of his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, and presented it with Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah, at his side. What do we make of this unique moment?

In this episode, Will is joined by biblical scholar Robyn Whitaker and professor of Learning Informatics Simon Buckingham Shum to dig into what this moment is revealing about the machines and us.

Guests
Rev. Assoc. Prof. Robyn Whitaker is Associate Professor of New Testament at Pilgrim Theological College, University of Divinity, and Director of the Wesley Centre for Theology, Ethics and Public Policy. She is an ordained Uniting Church minister and author of Even the Devil Quotes Scripture.
https://victas.uca.org.au/faith-in-the-public-square/
Prof. Simon Buckingham Shum is Professor of Learning Informatics and Director of the Connected Intelligence Centre at the University of Technology Sydney. His work sits where human-computer interaction, learning and AI meet. He is part of Meeting Ground (the community behind Spiritual Misfits).
https://simon.buckinghamshum.net/

Mentioned in this episode
Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas: https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html
Yuval Levin, “Idols of the Valley,” The New Atlantis: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/idols-of-the-valley
Vanessa Andreotti and the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective, Burnout from Humans: A Little Book About AI That Is Not Really About AI (free): https://burnoutfromhumans.net
Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination

Want to reach out and let us know your thoughts or suggestions for the show? Send us a message here; we’d love to hear from you.
The Spiritual Misfits Survival Guide (FREE): https://www.spiritualmisfits.com.au/survivalguide

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View all episodes at: https://spiritualmisfits.buzzsprout.com

In the latest episode of our Future Church Series, Will and Caro listen to two short excerpts from Rev Dr Sally Douglas’s keynote: one on silence and prayer as listening, and one on the names we use for God.

Sally argues that much of what passes for prayer is us talking at God, and that our busyness can be a quiet way of keeping God at a distance. She also makes a bold claim: addressing God only as male is a form of idolatry. And the tradition gives us plenty of other alternative ways of addressing God. 

You can listen to Sally's full keynote from Future Church Conference here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RnZX5PQefI&list=PLDqN433ivCxY&index=3

Connect more with Sally and buy her books here: https://www.sallydouglas.net

Want to reach out and let us know your thoughts or suggestions for the show? Send us a message here; we’d love to hear from you.
The Spiritual Misfits Survival Guide (FREE): https://www.spiritualmisfits.com.au/survivalguide

Sign up to our mailing list:
https://spiritualmisfits.com.au/

Join our online Facebook community:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/spiritualmisfitspodcast

Support the pod:
https://spiritualmisfits.com.au/support-us/

View all episodes at: https://spiritualmisfits.buzzsprout.com