British journalist David Goodhart on the Anywhere-Somewhere divide challenging national unity abroad and at home. --- Is Australia polarised?   The country is no UK roiled by Brexit, or US torn apart by the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency in 2016. But we’ve had our own brushes with polarisation – most recently on the question of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament.  On this episode of Life & Faith, we look at the issue of national division from a sideways angle: could the Anywhere-Somewhere divide explain contemporary polarisation and the gulf in people’s instincts?  The terms belong to David Goodhart, author of The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics and Head, Hand, Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century.   People in the Anywhere class, Goodhart says, tend to be well-educated, mobile, and cosmopolitan, making up about 20-25% of the national population. Their Somewhere counterparts, on the other hand, tend to be more rooted in their local communities, perhaps more conservative and communitarian, and make up 50% of the population.  Neither worldview is better or worse, he argues, but Anywheres tend to run the country, and don’t reliably read the national room. For Goodhart, this explains the cry for recognition of recent populist movements – and raises the question of where someone might seek what Goodhart calls “unconditional recognition”.  “The institutions that gave people unconditional recognition like the family, like the church or indeed the nation, all of these things are weaker and the weakening of that unconditional recognition bears most heavily on the people who are the lowest achievers, as it were, in modern liberal democracies.”  --  Explore  David’s book The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics  David’s book Head, Hand, Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century  David’s “Too Diverse?” essay for Prospect   Brigid Delaney’s piece in The Guardian after the 2019 federal election  The LSE blog post on British Parliament’s “class problem”  The SMH report on the backgrounds of Australia’s federal MPs

Our cultural narrative says there is no supernatural or transcendent realm. The CPX team wants to break that spell.  --- Seen & Heard is back – and this time, the team have disenchantment in their sights, or the belief that there is no more supernatural or transcendent realm to life, that science is the only verifiable path to truth, and that all things religious are debunked, once and for all.  But is this true? The books and films we’ve been reading and watching might disagree.   Natasha highlights beloved Australian author Helen Garner’s encounter with an angel and our flirtation with the supernatural through occasions like Halloween, before taking us through the supernatural stylings of the latest Poirot film A Haunting in Venice, based (extremely loosely) on Agatha Christie’s 1969 novel Hallowe’en Party.   Simon has been reading the biography of tennis icon and former World No. 1 Andre Agassi who, it turns out, hated tennis and wrestled with fame, but discovered that helping people is the “only perfection there is”.   A world that has cast off religion and the transcendent also leaves behind any account of the good life that goes along with those claims. Yet Agassi discovered that being the best tennis player in the world didn’t fulfil him. Only serving others did, which resonates with the Christian claim that the good life is a life lived for others.   And Justine raves about Susannah Clarke’s novel Piranesi and its vivid portrayal of what the disenchanted view of the world lacks: wonder, deep communion with the world, joy, and hope. Plus, Justine makes a bold claim:  Susannah Clarke is the 21st-century successor to C.S. Lewis.  --  Explore  Helen Garner describing her angelic encounter at the 2018 Sydney Writers’ Festival (from 30 mins)  Sean Kelly’s column mentioning Hilary Mantel’s possibly demonic encounter  Trailer for A Haunting in Venice  Natasha’s article on Halloween, published in the Sydney Morning Herald  Andre Agassi’s Open: An Autobiography  The Guardian’s interview with Susannah Clarke  Piranesi by Susannah Clarke  Wikipedia entry on the real-life Piranesi, the 18th-century architect and artist

A new book tells the stories of people whose encounters with New Atheism set them on the path to Christianity.   ---  “He said, I’ve been a scientist all my life and I was an atheist – quite a happy atheist, you know, I wasn’t particularly looking for other worldviews. Until I read The God Delusion in 2006. And that really shook my faith in atheism.”  It’s around 15 years ago that the so-called New Atheism – represented most prominently by the “Four Horsemen” Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and of course Richard Dawkins – had its heyday. The conversation they instigated gave many people permission to fully and publicly embrace disbelief in God; perhaps even a strong belief that religion was harmful and should be done away with.   For others, encountering the work of the New Atheists had quite the opposite effect. A new book, Coming to Faith Through Dawkins: 12 Essays on the Pathway from New Atheism to Christianity, edited by Alister McGrath and Denis Alexander, tells the stories of people for whom, paradoxically, New Atheism became a doorway to Christian faith.   In this episode of Life & Faith, co-editor Denis Alexander explains how the book “wrote itself” and why it’s not meant to be a triumphalist read. And contributors Johan Erasmus and Anikó Albert explain why the New Atheism had such a significant – and contrary – impact on their lives.  ---  Buy Coming to Faith Through Dawkins: 12 Essays on the Pathway from New Atheism to Christianity

This week marks 60 years since the death of CS Lewis and that seems like an appropriate moment to return to a very popular episode from a couple of years back. --- A lot of people know the date 22nd of November 1963 because that's the date that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. That dramatic event overshadowed another death that same day on the other side of the Atlantic – the death of the beloved writer and public Christian CS Lewis, best known still today for his Narnia stories. It's 60 years this week since Lewis's death and that seems like an appropriate moment to return to a very popular episode from a couple of years back. In 2021 we marked 80 years since the origins of Lewis's book, Mere Christianity, which in an unlikely turn of events became one of the most influential books of the past century. Mere Christianity and Lewis's other writings have only grown in popularity since his death in 1963, and this episode goes some way to explaining why.

Seeing war up close and surviving nonetheless leaves its mark. --- Andrew Hastie would not be the first person to join the defence force out of both a hunger for adventure and deep-seated sense of duty. After a distinguished career in the army, including being an officer in the elite Special Air Service (SAS), Hastie speaks to Life & Faith about the experience. He explains why he joined up, his gruelling entry into the SAS and his three tours of Afghanistan. Here we learn about the Afghan people Andrew worked with, the pressure and intense experience of engaging an enemy in an unfamiliar land and culture, and the toll of responsibility when the stakes are so high. This is a raw and honest assessment of the cost of war, the ethics of battle and the weight of the hard-won lessons of the combat zone. What can faith offer to those experiencing the wounds of moral injury so prevalent in those who have been taken out of civilian life and placed into the extreme environment of war?

Hope feels scarce, but it’s not lost – and it’s within our power to be people of hope.    --- “I certainly have clients who are in their twenties who are saying to me, I will not have children because look at the world! So, the question is, where is the vision of hope?”  Clinical psychologist Leisa Aitken gets that hope seems in short supply right now. Daily headlines are a barrage of bad news – of wars and rumours of wars, politics in breakdown, the life support systems of the earth in crisis. Rising rates of poor mental health among the young show that the next generation is struggling. The future doesn’t seem all that bright.  We need collective action to address the world’s growing disorder. But who do we need to be in the face of our present hope crisis?  Leisa has been researching hope for the past decade. In this interview, fresh from her 2023 CPX Richard Johnson Lecture, she runs us through the psychology of hope, offering us tools to help us cope with the times in which we live.   Leisa also covers the limits of mindfulness, the correlation between hope and feeling connected to something bigger than the self, and what is within our power to do – right now – to be people of hope.  “It’s easy to spend our lives just in distraction. But we can surround ourselves with people who are going to help us bring about our hopes and we can have eyes to see the glimpses of what we hope for – and to be those glimpses,” Leisa said.  “The beauty of glimpses is we don’t have to change everything in the world to bring hope about. We need just a taste. Just a glimpse.”  --  Explore  Leisa’s website  The “sunny nihilism” article  Fancy some marriage advice from Leisa?  More on mindfulness from Leisa

Why have conspiracy theories gained so much traction? And are Christians more prone to believe them?   ---  “I’d like to say that it’s all intellectual, but I don’t think it is.”  The belief that behind the visible mechanisms of society, powerful forces are up to no good is hardly a new idea (or reality). But geopolitics and culture wars in recent years have thrown up plenty of material for conspiracy theorists to work with.   What’s so appealing about these theories? When do they become a problem? And how can we have constructive conversations about them, without one side just infuriating or dismissing the other?   Nigel Chapman is the lead author of the ISCAST paper “Who to Trust? Christian Belief in Conspiracy Theories”, which digs into the phenomenon of conspiracism, including how Christian faith and community can either feed into or mitigate against such beliefs.   And Michel Gagné is someone who’s been down the rabbit hole himself, and returned – starting with the myths and theories surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy 60 years ago. He explains how he got in – and out! – and offers advice for families and friends who find themselves divided and exhausted by conspiracy theories.  “If we dehumanise others, we are on the slippery slope of creating a false reality, a simplistic myth that does not reflect our world.”   ---- EXPLORE:   ISCAST discussion paper, Who to Trust? Christian Belief in Conspiracy Theories   Michel Gagné’s book, Thinking Critically about the Kennedy Assassination: Debunking the Myths and Conspiracy Theories  Michel Gagné’s podcast Paranoid Planet

Why might someone who’s not religious want to send their kids to a faith-based school? --- “Teachers are one of the few groups of people in society who can tell other people what to do in their discretionary time and – by and large – they obey.”  Education is among our core activities as a society – so it’s unsurprising that it can be a battleground for all sorts of ideas.  David I. Smith is Professor of Education at Calvin University, and he has spent decades thinking about how education really forms people. He says that there’s no such thing as a “vanilla” or “neutral” education – and that even a maths or a French textbook will imply a whole way of seeing the world and other people.  “We spent a lot of time learning how to say in French and German, ‘This is my name. This is my favourite food. I like this music. I don’t like biology. This is what I did last weekend. I would like two train tickets to Hamburg. I would like the steak and fries. I would like a hotel room for two nights.’ So the implicit message of the textbooks was that the reason why we learn other people’s languages is so that we can obtain the goods and services that we deserve and so that we can tell people about ourselves … It’s not really imagining us as people who listen to other people’s stories or as people who care about the members of the culture we’re visiting who don’t work in hotels, or as people who might want to talk about the meaning of life and not just the price of a hamburger.” Given that about a third of Australian schools are religious, and that faith-based education is the subject of nervousness on both the left and right of politics these days, it’s worth asking: why do parents who aren’t religious want to send their kids to Christian schools? What’s the content of a “Christian” education? And what happens when religious schools get it wrong?

We’ve heard of burnout and PTSD but what about “moral injury”, that’s affecting soldiers and also Covid-19 health workers?   --- “Soul sick”.   That’s how some of the literature describes the effects of “moral injury” on people. Perhaps we’re more used to violence leaving a physical mark or causing psychological trauma that disrupts a person’s ability to live their everyday life.   But moral injury is a different kind of wound altogether. As defined by Andrew Sloane, theologian and Morling College ethicist, “it’s when somebody has either done or witnessed something which is in deep conflict with their internalised moral values, and it leaves them damaged psychologically, emotionally, ethically, spiritually.”  “It is a disruption to someone’s understanding of themselves. It’s a matter of wounded identity and a wounded sense of what the world is meant to be and who they’re meant to be in it,” Andrew said, before explaining how the experience of caring for people during the Covid-19 pandemic left many health workers morally injured.   In this episode of Life & Faith, we also hear from Sam Gregory, the last Australian Defence Force (ADF) chaplain in Afghanistan, sent there as Coalition forces were withdrawing after 20 years in the country.   He describes the turmoil of feeling “the sense [that] we weren’t done yet, and that we were being constrained by political forces to bring about the end of that operation”. Then there were his “feelings of profound shame” that Australian military involvement in Afghanistan meant that soldiers essentially had to dehumanise not only the enemy but also their local allies.  “My faith tells me that every human is made in the image of God and therefore worthy of dignity and respect and value. And then I’m part of an organiszation that has taken that dignity and respect away from a whole nation of people,” Sam said.  This is a confronting and difficult exploration of the invisible wounds suffered by those to whom we entrust our safety and security. But as health workers leave the caring professions, and returned war veterans struggle to adjust to normal life, it’s an increasingly necessary conversation.   --- Explore  Andrew Sloane’s article for ABC Religion & Ethics on moral injury and Covid-19 health workers  Atonement: the Australian Story episode featuring Dean Yates

Australians are used to filling in forms that ask whether they have Aboriginal or Torres Strait heritage. But not many of us have contact with people from the farthest northern reaches of our country.   --- This week on Life & Faith we talk with Torres strait community leader and pastor Gabriel Bani. We hear about his growing up on the islands where houses were crowded but community life was very strong.   Gabriel tells us about his, and his people’s embrace of Christianity, despite the dubious methods used to bring that message to his people.  What has been the cost to the people of the Torres Strait of their encounter with Europeans? And what can be learned from the islander people? Gabriel Bani urges us to listen to his people, and to be hopeful, as we all search for meaningful and positive engagement.

A detective and a scholar tackle the question: why are we all so obsessed with crime stories? --- “When I was a child, not everything was a detective story. Now it is, on television. And it’s almost as if we all want to know, we want to know the big question: who did it??”  Judging by the perennial popularity of detective novels and crime shows, and the current wave of true crime podcasts, it’s not a stretch to call our culture murder-obsessed. Why are these stories so fascinating to us? Is there something wrong with us? It’s a topic writers have long been drawn to, in essays like George Orwell’s “Decline of the English Murder” and W. H. Auden’s “The Guilty Vicarage”. In this episode of Life & Faith, Natasha Moore speaks with literary scholar and theologian Alison Milbank about the hold these stories have over us – and also Jim Warner Wallace, who’s been dealing with the real thing for decades in his work as a cold case detective.  “When you knock on the door of the neighbour of a serial killer, they’re likely to say, ‘Oh I’m so glad you’re taking that guy to jail, that guy is crazy – I mean it smells bad over there, there’s all kinds of weird noises, he’s always digging holes in his backyard’ … When you think of my kinds of cases, you knock on the neighbour’s door and tell them ‘I’m taking your neighbour to jail for this case from 30 years ago’, they’ll generally say, ‘No, I’ve known that guy for 30 years, he’s a great guy. No way could he have done that.’” From our deepest convictions about human nature to how you can tell if a suspect might be lying, this episode delves into the appeal of the murder mystery, and also unfolds the surprising story of how Jim came to apply his particular skill-set to the truth claims of the Christian faith.  “All of my cases, I call these ‘death by a thousand paper cuts’ – cases where you’ve got 80 pieces of evidence that point to this suspect. Any one of those pieces of evidence I’m not sure I would want to go to trial with … but when you have all 80 and they point to the same reasonable inference, this is now heavy and weighty. And that’s where I was with the Gospels.”  — Reading mentions: George Orwell, “Decline of the English Murder” W. H. Auden, “The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the detective story, by an addict” Jim Warner Wallace, Cold-Case Christianity (10th Anniversary Edition) And check out the rest of Jim’s work at https://coldcasechristianity.com/

Sixty years ago, MLK declared “I have a dream”. As Australia votes on the Voice, we grapple with racism.  --- It’s been 60 years since Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr. ascended the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., declaring that “one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers – I have a dream today.”  More than half a century on from King’s dream, where are we in Australia on the vexed question of race relations?   In this episode of Life & Faith, we speak to fellow CPXer Max Jeganathan, who’s recently written about the Voice and his own experience of racism in Australia – according to him, the “least racist” country he’s ever lived in.   Max was born into a Sri Lankan Tamil family with close personal experience of the Black July riots of 1983, a government-sanctioned program of racial discrimination against minority Tamils. His family wound up in Australia as humanitarian refugees.   While Max is very positive about growing up in Australia, he’s still experienced racism. Which provides a glimpse, perhaps, of the racial discrimination experienced by Aboriginal Australians on an ongoing basis.  --  Explore  Max’s article on how the Voice is a question of love and moral imagination  Max’s article on racism in light of the 60th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s speech  The Martin Luther King Jr. segment from For the love of God: How the church is better and worse than you ever imagined.

An award-winning Australian novelist shares her experience of grief, chronic pain, great joy – and the supernatural.   ---  “As I’ve travelled the world and talked to endless strangers and asked them, did they ever have an experience they couldn’t explain? … I would have asked that question many, many hundreds of times. There’s been nobody who said no.”  49% of Australians say they never have a spiritual conversation. We think of ourselves as a very secular people – yet behind labels like “no religion” and “spiritual but not religious” lies a rich and varied (and sometimes strange) story.   Heather Rose is the award-winning author of Museum of Modern Love and Bruny – and now, the spiritual memoir she says she didn’t mean to write, Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here.  Heather’s life has been punctuated by encounters with the supernatural and intense spiritual experiences. In this conversation, she talks about nearly becoming a Buddhist nun, participating in a Native American Sun Dance, the beauty of her father’s Christian faith, and her wrestle with the idea that perhaps nothing bad does ever happen here.

Rob Stokes reflects on the joys and challenges of his political career, as well as his latest challenge – solving homelessness.   --- Simon Smart speaks with ex-politician Rob Stokes about public service and the most satisfying aspects of his life in politics. Stokes gives an honest account of not only the best aspects of being able to “get things done” but also the frustrations of compromise, the exhausting demands and the life of a politician. Ultimately Stokes encourages would-be political operatives to dive in with an attitude of service and sacrifice and urges us all to be more engaged in the political process.   His latest project aims to tackle homelessness, a challenge Stokes is remarkably upbeat and energised about.      Explore:  Faith Housing Alliance

This week we take on a topic most of us want to avoid and find it surprisingly life-giving.   --- Sydney Morning Herald opinion editor Chris Harrison faced death as a teenager and lived to tell the tale. Listeners will find his account of returning to the sports field where, after being hit with cricket ball, he was clinically dead for two minutes, both moving and confronting.   This week we hear from Chris about that experience as well as from Marianne Rozario, the co-author of a report that was conducted in the UK into attitudes to death and dying. Rozario explains the way our feelings about death, dying and the memorialisation of those who have passed, have changed (and how they have stayed the same), and what all this suggests about us as human beings.   Justine and Simon are left to consider the way we process death and the loss of those we love and where we might find hope in the face of the harsh reality that is true of every life.   Explore:  Chris Harrison: “"I was clinically dead for 2 minutes. This is what I saw, Sydney Morning Herald (January 29, 2022) Theos Think Tank report: Ashes to Ashes: Beliefs, Trends, and Practices in Dying, Death, and the Afterlife

This highly acclaimed, speculative novel tackles the mind-body problem, and the mystery of consciousness.  --- If given the choice, would you agree to be uploaded to an entirely digital existence: freed from death, pain, and suffering – because freed from the body? Or would you remain human on a dying planet?  That’s the thought experiment behind Grace Chan’s speculative novel Every Version of You, a book that fleshes out our anxieties and fears – and also, desires – about technology and how it affects what it means to be human.  In Chan’s vision of the future, Australia in the 2080s has been ravaged by climate change. With the physical world in breakdown, people spend more and more time in Gaia, a digital paradise. But then the option to be uploaded to Gaia – indefinitely – becomes a reality. What will Chan’s characters choose – and what would you?   In this episode of Life & Faith, Justine Toh interviews Grace Chan about her novel, the winner of the University of Sydney People’s Choice Award at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards 2023.   Hear Grace talk about how her book has gotten book clubs buzzing and how her training as a psychiatrist influenced the novel’s take on identity and the self. Then ask yourself: would an uploaded humanity remain human?  Explore  Seen & Heard: Mrs Davis and other tech misadventures, featuring Grace Chan’s Every Version of You.  Would you want to be uploaded to a digital heaven? Justine Toh’s article for CPX  Grace Chan on Twitter

Scholar and peacemaker Riad Kassis, from the perspective of a region in crisis, calls all of us to hope and generosity.   ---  “We talk about peace in our region; we have a greeting that says, peace be upon you, and we respond, and be upon you as well. But it is just a greeting. We would like to see it in practice.”   When Riad Kassis was a teenager, he and his family left their home in Lebanon during a civil war and took refuge next door, in Syria. These days, living back in Lebanon not far from the Syrian border, the situation is reversed: around 2 million refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war are now living in Lebanon, a country with a total population of 5 million.   This is just one of the crises faced by Lebanese people: economic collapse, the wake of the terrible explosion in Beirut in 2020, the pandemic of course, and the recent earthquake in the region have caused continual turbulence and hardship.   This week on Life & Faith, Dr Kassis describes what life is like in the midst of continual crisis, and what helps him to hope for more peaceful days. An Old Testament scholar, he also discusses feelings of frustration with God, and shares some of his wife Izdihar’s work with Syrian refugees, especially young women. And he has a message of encouragement for Australians specifically.

How the “invisible hand” of the market relies on the critical – and undervalued – work of care.   ---  “We need to put care at the centre of the Australian economy.”  Before Sam Mostyn headed up the Women’s Economic Equality Taskforce, advising the Federal Government on ways to improve women’s economic equality, she gave a blistering address to the National Press Club about the long-ignored contribution of care – and the women who were mostly expected to do it – to national wellbeing.   Mostyn gave that address in late 2021 after months of lockdown, during which women did disproportionately more housework and childcare than men. Beyond individual households, feminised care industries full of “essential workers” – nurses, teachers, childcare workers, and aged care staff – also shouldered an extra load caring for vulnerable people through the pandemic.   Both kinds of work make up the care economy, or the paid and unpaid work of keeping people alive and well. It’s powered by women, and it’s typically taken for granted.  This episode of Life & Faith is timed to coincide with the 300th anniversary of the birth of Adam Smith, the Scottish philosopher, economist, and “father” of capitalism. Smith held that the “invisible hand” – a metaphor for a hands-off approach to buying and selling in the marketplace – would produce beneficial outcomes for all.  Not so fast, say care feminists. They argue that the “invisible hand” can do nothing without the “invisible heart”: the compassion and love that drives the care economy, and on which the market economy is entirely reliant, but which isn’t accounted for in measures of GDP.   In this episode, we sample two stories of care, highlighting its invisibility and yet the essential role it plays in people’s flourishing.   We speak to Andie Thorpe, a doctoral student who became her mother’s official carer when she was 10 years old. Andie was also named NSW Young Carer of the Year in 2014.   We also interview the journalist and social critic Anne Manne, who has been speaking and writing about the care economy long before it hit the mainstream.   Note: we had a technical difficulty in the Anne Manne interview that makes Justine periodically sound like a robot! Apologies for that.     -  Explore  Anne Manne’s Quarterly Essay: Love and Money – The Family and the Free Market  Anne Manne’s book Motherhood: How should we care for our families?  Anne Manne in The Monthly, writing about making women’s unpaid work count  Nancy Folbre’s book The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values  SBS profile on Andie Thorpe  Simon Smart writing in The Sydney Morning Herald about Robert Putnam’s work on social capital and faith communities

The CPX team freaks out about AI, explores stories of “efficiency” run amok, and probes our tech utopias.    --- The apocalypse will be ... boring.  Or so says Charlie Warzel, tech journalist for The Atlantic. He means that AI won’t put you out of a job or take over the world, so much as overstuff your inbox and give you more mind-numbing tasks to complete.  Other people in the know about AI are less optimistic. Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather” of AI who resigned from Google in May, Sam Altman, the CEO of the company behind ChatGPT, and others have sounded the alarm: AI is progressing too quickly, no one knows exactly how it works, and without careful regulation it will upend life as we know it.   There are a lot of unknowns where technology is concerned. One thing we do know, though, is it makes for great TV, and stories and books.  In this edition of Seen & Heard, the CPX team debriefs on what they’ve been watching and reading.   Natasha takes us through the twists and turns of Amazon Prime’s Mrs Davis, a “bonkers” show about a nun facing off against Mrs Davis, the all-knowing algorithm against whom she has a grudge.   Simon looks at the way George Saunders’ short story “Escape from Spiderhead” (and the Spiderhead film based on it) explores how “the greater good” is used to justify all kinds of evils.   Justine looks closer at the digital utopia on offer in Grace Chan’s speculative novel Every Version of You, and finds that its promise of agelessness, no death, no suffering, and no body is basically heaven without God.     Explore:  ABC article on Replika  Every Version of You by Grace Chan  Escape From Spiderhead by George Saunders (via The New Yorker)  Mrs Davis trailer  Her and a Disembodied Future by Mark Stephens  Andy Crouch’s Richard Johnson Lecture on why technology keeps disappointing us and Q&A  Charlie Warzel: Here’s how AI will come for your job

Jo Swinney grew up in family committed to environmental care and community. Her parents’ efforts to revitalise a small piece of land in Portugal eventually spawned an international family of organisations committed to conservation of the natural environment.          --- In this wide-ranging discussion, Jo Swinney talks to Simon Smart about growing up in a commune-type existence in Portugal where her English parents were committed to conservation and fostering biodiversity. And also community.  Jo left for boarding school in the UK when she was 13 and live a nomadic existence for many years before settling into marriage and family in England. The smells and sounds of her childhood in Portugal never left her and nor did her commitment to hospitality and creation care.   This is a conversation of touching honesty about family, friendship and the things that sustain us when tragedy strikes.  --- Explore: A Rocha Books by Jo Swinney A Place at The Table: Faith, hope and hospitalityHome: The quest to belong