Richard Johnson Lectures

Disconnected: Q&A with Andy Crouch

In this episode you’ll hear the open Q&A session following Andy Crouch’s 2022 lecture,
Disconnected: Why technology keeps disappointing us
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Andy Crouch is a partner for theology and culture at Praxis, an organisation that works as a creative engine for redemptive entrepreneurship. He is an author of many books and his latest is The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming relationship in a technological age
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Check out CPX's other podcast Life & Faith, a weekly conversation about the beauty and complexity of belief in the 21st century.
Andy’s book: The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming relationship in a technological age
This episode is sponsored by International Justice Mission

Disconnected: Why Technology Keeps Disappointing Us

In this episode you’ll hear Andy Crouch’s 2022 lecture,
Disconnected: Why technology keeps disappointing us
Technology promises so much — and truly has transformed our lives — but somehow it never quite delivers.
Drawing on an older vision of human beings as heart-soul-mind-strength complexes, designed for love, Andy Crouch makes the case for applying our scientific knowledge in a way that restores things that are in strangely short supply in our technological age: real connection, relationship, and hope.
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Andy Crouch is a partner for theology and culture at Praxis, an organisation that works as a creative engine for redemptive entrepreneurship. He is an author of many books and his latest is The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming relationship in a technological age
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Check out CPX's other podcast Life & Faith, a weekly conversation about the beauty and complexity of belief in the 21st century.
Andy’s book: The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming relationship in a technological age
This episode is sponsored by International Justice Mission

Out of Sight: Attentiveness in a Dismissive Age

In this episode you’ll hear Scott Stephen’s 2021 lecture,
Out of Sight: Attentiveness in a Dismissive Age
We commonly hear that the times in which we live are “unprecedented”. Not entirely without justification, when we consider the proliferation of technologies that flood our waking hours.
Yet beneath the busy surface of our media-saturated age, there lurks a temptation that is in no way unprecedented: the old temptation to live superficially – which is to say, inattentively. Like Shakespeare’s King Lear, we increasingly crave affection, fear irrelevance, are unsure who to trust, and so banish those who might wound us “out of our sight”.
The eyes are a moral organ. The contemptuous gaze can wither; the attentive glance gives life. At a time when so many distractions can cloud our vision, Scott Stephens urges us – in the tender words of the loyal Kent, in King Lear – to “see better”.
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Scott Stephens is the ABC’s Religion and Ethics online editor, and the co-host, with Waleed Aly, of The Minefield on ABC Radio National. His book On Contempt is published by Melbourne University Press.
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Check out CPX's other podcast Life & Faith, a weekly conversation about the beauty and complexity of belief in the 21st century.
This episode is sponsored by International Justice Mission

Free To Be Me? The Forgotten Story of Religious Liberty

In this episode you’ll hear Sarah Irving-Stonebraker’s 2020 lecture,
Free To Be Me? The Forgotten Story of Religious Liberty
"Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion", reads the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But how did we get here?
Freedom of religion - or of no religion - is grounded on liberty of conscience, an idea with a back-story most of us are unaware of. In recovering this story, historian Sarah Irving-Stonebraker takes us all the way back to the ancient Middle East, and on a whirlwind tour through Europe, the Americas, and Australia, and asks: does the notion of religious liberty still have currency today?
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Sarah Irving-Stonebraker is Senior Lecturer in History at Western Sydney University. She was awarded her PhD from the University of Cambridge, after which she was a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford then Assistant Professor at Florida State University. Her book Natural Science and the Origins of the British Empire, published in 2008, was awarded The Royal Society of Literature and Jerwood Foundation Award for Non-Fiction.
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Check out CPX's other podcast Life & Faith, a weekly conversation about the beauty and complexity of belief in the 21st century.
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This episode is sponsored by International Justice Mission

Crossing the Great Divide: Building Bridges in an Age of Tribalism

In this episode you’ll hear Tim Dixon’s 2019 lecture,
Crossing the Great Divide: Building Bridges in an Age of Tribalism
The Western world is seeing a collapse in people’s faith in institutions, democracy, and even each other. Societies are fractured; political norms upended. Polarising debates centre on issues of identity, values, and belonging, and tribal voices muzzle the notion of a common good. In many countries, religious faith is becoming just one more marker of tribal division. Tim Dixon offers a vision for how we might reunite increasingly fragmented societies.
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Tim Dixon is co-founder of More in Common, an international initiative which has published some of the world's leading research on the drivers of polarisation and social division. He has worked as chief speechwriter and economic adviser for two Australian Prime Ministers, and has helped start and grow social movement organisations around the world that have worked to protect civilians in Syria, address modern day slavery, promote gun control in the U.S., and engage faith communities in social justice.
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Check out CPX's other podcast Life & Faith, a weekly conversation about the beauty and complexity of belief in the 21st century.
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This episode is sponsored by International Justice Mission

Where Did I Come From? Christianity, Secularism, and the Individual

In this episode you’ll hear Nick Spencer’s 2018 lecture,
Where Did I Come From? Christianity, Secularism, and the Individual
It's obvious, isn’t it?
Life should be respected. We should obey the rule of law. Humans have inalienable dignity. People are of equal worth. Freedom is good. Science is legitimate. And - as Life of Brian reminded us - "we are all individuals".
Except that it is far from obvious.
Nick Spencer is on a quest to rediscover our origin stories, and what makes the West the West.
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Nick Spencer is Research Director of Theos Think Tank in London. He has written for The Guardian and The Telegraph and has been described by The Economist as “like a prophet crying in the post-modern wilderness”. Nick is the author of several books including Atheists: The Origin of the Species, and The Evolution of the West: How Christianity Has Shaped Our Values.
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Check out CPX's other podcast Life & Faith, a weekly conversation about the beauty and complexity of belief in the 21st century.
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This episode is sponsored by International Justice Mission

Is Christianity Bad News for Women?

In this episode you’ll hear Amy Orr-Ewing’s 2017 lecture,
Is Christianity Bad News for Women?
The 2nd-century Greek philosopher Celsus famously dismissed Christianity as a religion of women, children, and slaves – that is to say, not to be taken seriously. But Christianity is much more likely to be condemned today, not for being a religion of women, but a religion against women. If gender equality mattered to the early church, what happened to it? What does Christianity’s chequered treatment of women mean for its credibility today? And is the Christian faith a force for the oppression of women, or for their flourishing?
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Amy Orr-Ewing is a Senior Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics, and is a widely sought-after speaker who has addressed audiences at the White House and the UK Parliament. She regularly appears on TV and radio to comment on a variety of topics relating to the Christian faith. Her doctoral studies focused on the British novelist, essayist, and “Christian humanist” Dorothy L. Sayers, and she is the author of several books, including Where is God in all the Suffering, and Why Trust the Bible?
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Check out CPX's other podcast Life & Faith, a weekly conversation about the beauty and complexity of belief in the 21st century.
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This episode is sponsored by International Justice Mission

The Myth of Religious Violence

In this episode you’ll hear William Cavanaugh’s 2016 lecture,
The Myth Of Religious Violence
It’s a widely held assumption in Western societies that religion has a peculiar tendency to promote violence. Indeed, much of our domestic and foreign policy assumes this – but is it a fair assumption? Are religions more inclined to promote violence than things like nationalism and access to oil? What even counts as “religion”? And what role have “secular” ideologies as well as “religious” ones played in fomenting violence? American philosopher William Cavanaugh offers some provocative arguments.
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William Cavanaugh is Professor of Theology at DePaul University in Chicago. He holds degrees from Notre Dame, Cambridge, and Duke University, and has worked for the Center for Civil and Human Rights at the Notre Dame Law School. His areas of specialisation include political theology and economic ethics. He is the author of The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict, and Field Hospital: The Church’s Engagement with a Wounded World.
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Check out CPX's other podcast Life & Faith, a weekly conversation about the beauty and complexity of belief in the 21st century.
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This episode is sponsored by International Justice Mission

The End of Faith: Has Science Made Religion Redundant?

In this episode you’ll hear Peter Harrison’s 2015 lecture,
The End Of Faith: Has Science Made Religion Redundant?
The conflict between science and religion seems entrenched, even inevitable. But is it? Peter Harrison is one of the most important scholars working in the area of science and religion today, and he challenges our understanding of what has historically been meant by the concepts of "science" and "religion" - and reconstructs the true history of their turbulent relations.
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Peter Harrison is currently an Australian Laureate Fellow at the University of Queensland. Before taking up that post he was the Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford. He has published extensively in the area of intellectual history with a focus on the historical interactions between science and religion, and has authored or edited six books, including The Territories of Science and Religion.
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Check out CPX's other podcast Life & Faith, a weekly conversation about the beauty and complexity of belief in the 21st century.
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This episode is sponsored by International Justice Mission

A Public Faith: Serving the Common Good

The inaugural Richard Johnson Lecture was delivered in 2014 by Yale University’s Miroslav Volf.
Volf’s upbringing in Croatia as the only Christian in a school of 3,500 was pivotal in the development of his faith. A victim of intense and sustained interrogation by the government of then communist Yugoslavia, much of Volf's work focuses on forgiveness and reconciliation. He maintains that the Christian vision of the world entails the possibility of overcoming the past for both the victim and the perpetrator of wrongs. 
His topic for this lecture was A Public Faith: Serving the Common Good
While the place of faith in the public square is a contested, and contentious, subject, and many opponents of religion would rather it remain a private affair – and some believers are tempted to agree – Miroslav Volf believes faith can contribute to human flourishing for all people.
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Miroslav Volf is Founding Director of the Yale Centre for Faith and Culture, and the Henry B. Wright Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School. He has written more than 15 books, including Exclusion and Embrace, A Public Faith, and most recently For the Life of the World.
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Check out CPX's other podcast Life & Faith, a weekly conversation about the beauty and complexity of belief in the 21st century.
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This episode is sponsored by International Justice Mission