All Matters of Life and Death articles – Page 8
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ShowsMatters of Life & Death: Space 2: Astrobiology, 16 billion billion Earth-like planets, LUCA and the non-competitive Imago Dei
In the second half of our conversation with theologian Andrew Davison, we ask what the discovery of life elsewhere in the universe would mean for Christian faith and teaching.
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ShowsMatters of Life & Death: Space 1: The James Webb telescope, extra-terrestrial life, hobbits of the universe and the doctrine of creation
In the week the first images from the new James Webb Space Telescope were beamed back to Earth, we are joined by theologian Andrew Davison to consider the spiritual value of cosmology and astrophysics.
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ShowsMatters of Life & Death: Simulation 2: Zoom’s face-smoothing, chatbot therapists, Trinitarianism, and evil as counterfeit
Today we’re going back to our conversation about simulation for part two of this re-broadcast.
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ShowsMatters of Life & Death: Simulation 1: Deep fakes, David Beckham speaking Mandarin, Jean Baudrillard’s four phases, and image as sacrament
For the next two weeks we’re dipping back into the Matters of Life and Death archive to bring you an episode we first broadcast last year. It’s all about simulation.
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ShowsMatters of Life & Death: Prenatal screening 2: The prohibition on soothsaying, transcending genetic determinism, a client-technician relationship and Heidi Crowter’s joyful self-advocacy
Could it be that some knowledge – including whether your unborn child has a serious genetic condition – is actually not helpful, and even harmful to us?
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ShowsMatters of Life & Death: Prenatal screening 1: Peering into the unknown, less than 1/150, blood tests over the internet, and disability doublethink
Pregnant women today are offered a battery of tests and screening for their unborn child, looking for an ever-increasing range of conditions and risks.
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ShowsMatters of Life & Death: Old people 2: Aging congregations, transcendence at the Arsenal, understanding life backwards, and honouring prayer warriors
Demographic trends reveal clearly the next century will be one increasingly dominated by older people. If God is giving us a lot more folk in their later years, what are they for in church life?
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ShowsMatters of Life & Death: Old people 1: The demographic transition, Reverend Thomas Malthus, Hasidic Jewish outliers, and the grey vote
The world’s population is rapidly becoming older and older, with many developed nations seeing unprecedented proportions of their citizens in retirement age.
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ShowsMatters of Life & Death: Robot rights 2: Rejecting self-definition, the citadel of human uniqueness, rehashing ‘God of the gaps’, and evangelising at androids
In the second part of our conversation on robot rights, we explore three Christian responses to calls for robot personhood, spanning the spectrum of hostility to optimism about the development.
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ShowsMatters of Life & Death: Robot rights 1: Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws, fauxbots, whimpering miniature dinosaurs, and inherent or conferred personhood
If and when autonomous and intelligent robots come into existence, should they be granted rights, or even personhood?
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ShowsMatters of Life & Death: Pregnancy crisis 2: Paternalistic gynaecologists, holding truth with grace, ambiguity in the ultrasound clinic, and refusing the culture war
Abortion is a flashpoint issue in both the church and wider culture, with the very language you choose used as a cudgel for either side.
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ShowsMatters of Life & Death: John Stott 2: Christians in the public square, an untried ideal, talking and living like Jesus, and the challenge of evangelical hagiography
This is part two of our re-broadcast of last year’s John Stott episode, to mark what would have been his centenary.
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ShowsMatters of Life & Death: John Stott 1: Double listening, a conservative radical, redefining ‘the ministry’ and salt as preservative
This month marks 101 years since the late John Stott was born, and his centenary last year prompted a flurry of events to mark the centenary of this highly influential vicar, Bible teacher and evangelical leader.
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ShowsMatters of Life & Death: Palliative care 2: Resisting assisted dying, the ‘superskill’ of listening, DNAR discussions, and euthanasia-free-zones
In Britain as in many countries there is a growing campaign to legalise assisted suicide and to make doctors prescribe on request lethal drugs to terminally ill patients.
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ShowsMatters of Life & Death: Palliative care 1: Dogs and Guinness on the wards, ‘living until you die’, deathbed prayers, and complicated grief
Over the past 60 years a new field of medicine has emerged – palliative care.
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ShowsMatters of Life & Death: Climate anxiety 2: Listening to the Global South, alienation from creation, throwing pebbles into God’s river, and rediscovering lament
Following on from our discussion last week on the rise of climate fatalism, we discuss what an authentically Christian response to our environmental crisis would look like.
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ShowsMatters of Life & Death: Climate anxiety 1: ’Delay means death’, media apathy, Extinction Rebellion, and fatalism among the young
The latest report from the UN’s climate scientists was both incredibly downbeat about climate change and almost entirely ignored by a media fixated on Ukraine.
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ShowsMatters of Life & Death: Human enhancement 2: Techno-optimism returns, the yuck factor, cultivating our bodies, and the divinisation of humanity
In this episode we pick up our conversation from last week about transhumanism and how technology might redefine what it means to be human.
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ShowsMatters of Life & Death: Human enhancement 1: Calico, the dragon tyrant, transhumanism, and monkeys playing Pong
Billions of dollars are currently being spent by a suite of private firms, mostly in Silicon Valley, pursuing radical research to enhance human capacities.
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ShowsMatters of Life & Death: Relaunch: How we started, baby boomers and millennials, the pandemic as catalyst, and the signal to noise ratio
To mark our arrival on the Premier network, we recap how Matters of Life and Death began and what we hope our intergenerational conversations might achieve.
