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The world has trust issues with its media. Three in five Australians trust TV and radio news, and what's in the newspapers. But in North America it is fewer than three in ten. Are we doing something better here, OR are we just a decade behind them?  Is it an economic problem? After all, ownership of our media has been contracting to just a few players. That alone has had some huge implications for the quality of news and who it speaks to. The online podcast world has arguably meant a democratisation of the way people are finding their news.  How can lost trust in media be regained?  GUESTS: Tara Henley, Canadian journalist, broadcaster and author of "The Trust Spiral"Jonathan Holmes, journalist, writer, former ABC TV presenter and broadcasterScott Mitchell, former ABC journalist and now co host of the podcast "Lamestream"This program was recorded on the lands of the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation

Is intolerance tightening its grip on public life?  The twentieth century was among the most intolerant in human history; the Holocaust, Stalinism, empires collapsing in blood.  So why, in the twenty-first century, is tolerance still so elusive?  In the final episode of a two-part series on toleration, God Forbid looks at the ever-growing allure of tribalism, cementing division along contentious political fault lines.  Guests: Dr Shaun Blanchard, Senior Lecturer in Theology, University of Notre Dame Australia. Author of the forthcoming Catholicism and Enlightenment. Dr Devleena Ghosh, Professor, School of Communication and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney.  Dr Abdullah Kunde, Founder and President of the Muslim Debate Initiative Australia. This program was made on the lands of the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation

Rulers throughout history have used tolerance and intolerance in their pursuit of power.  In our modern context, tolerance is often lauded as an unqualified good, but are there limitations? Should we extend tolerance to those who commit acts of violence?   In the first of two episodes on the rise and fall of tolerance, God Forbid looks at the religious roots of tolerance and intolerance.  Can lessons of the past be applied today, in an increasingly divided world?  GUESTS: Shaun Blanchard, Senior Lecturer in Theology, Notre Dame University.  Jürgen Overhoff, Professor of the History of Educational, University of Münster, Germany.  Francisco (Paco) Garcia-Serrano, Professor of History, Saint Louis University, Madrid.  This program was made on the lands of the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation

What is the place of religion in a pluralist society? Australia calls itself a secular country, yet it has never been more religiously diverse. Whether you're religious or secular, whether you support multi or mono-culturalism, it seems we all claim the authentic mantle of modern Australian identity. Yet none of us agree on what it is, much less who owns it. How should we grapple with our identity as a secular nation in a diverse and ever-changing world?  GUESTS:Renae Barker, Senior Lecturer, UWA Law School, author of State and Religion: The Australian Story.  Greg Melleuish, Professorial Fellow, Robert Menzies Institute; Fellow, Campion College. Co-author of Understanding Piety and Theology in the Culture of the West: The Poetic Life. See him in conversation at the Berry Writer's Festival in November.  Enqi Weng, Research Fellow, Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University. Author of Media Perceptions of Religious Changes in Australia: Of Dominance and Diversity.  This program was made on the lands of the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation

Generation Z is the first generation since the war to start out with less claim on the country than their parents. You might believe this story is just all about economics. Negative gearing, property investment, supply and demand...  But there's an older, even ancient, argument that says that says a country where people own nothing will eventually become a country where people are nothing.   That owning property doesn't just confer wealth. It's moral training. When you own, you own up. This was the vision of Prime Minister Menzies who spoke of responsibility for "homes material, homes human, and homes spiritual".  So was Menzies right? Does owning things make you more responsible, even a better person? Or is that the convenient story owners tell themselves, while the rest of us try to find this weeks rent?  GUESTS: James Vitali is a political theorist from Cambridge University, now a Conservative Party councillor in Dorset in the UK - His new book The Ownership Society: How Bourgeois values can save Britain.  Max Jeganathan is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity. On the Labor side - He advised the Rudd and Gillard governments.  This program was made on the lands of the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation

Neuroscience is now spectacularly good at explaining how brains work.  But there’s one thing it still can’t explain: why having a brain feels like something. Like anything at all!   Philosophers call this the Hard Problem of consciousness.   Is this gap in our knowledge something that science can never fully understand? Something intangible, even unknowable?   Some say it's a life force, an essence, a soul.  What, if anything, can religion offer this intangible?  GUESTS: Rev Antonios Caldas Coptic Orthodox priest and lecturer at St Cyril’s Coptic Orthodox Theological College Prof Neil Levy philosopher at Macquarie University and Oxford University

The Northern Territory is set to become the final Australian jurisdiction to legalise voluntary assisted dying (VAD). While thirty years of arguing comes to an end, God Forbid examines the wider conversations that are essential, but so often overlooked when it comes to voluntary assisted dying. GUESTS: Christoper Dudfield, Spiritual Care Practitioner, clinical leader and researcher. Jodie Clarkson, retired teacher and community worker, palliative care outpatient in Mparntwe (Alice Springs). Professor Charlie Corke, Senior Intensive Care Specialist, Barwon Health. Further reading:Christopher Dudfield reflects on our obligations to the dying, even when we cannot endorse their choices, on ABC Religion and Ethics (18 August 2026). WARNING: This episode of contains discussion of suicide, death and dying.  Further informationHelp and support is always available. Helplines (24 hours/7 days a week): Lifeline on 13 11 14 or 13YARN on 13 92 76.  For bereavement support visit Compassionate Friends or call their National Grief Hotline on 1300 064 068. This program was recorded on the lands of the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation.

Mother Earth. Mother Mary. The "good mother." Is there a more impossible standard than motherhood itself? Every culture seems to believe in a mother who is endless. Endlessly patient, endlessly giving, endlessly present.  In Christianity she's Mary, the sinless virgin, the giving and eternal mother of the church.  In psychology she's the "Good Mother", always available and calm, never faltering.  In real life, she's the woman who looks like she's got motherhood handled, but who, if you asked her, would tell you she falls short like everyone else.  Where does that ideal come from? What does it cost the women who try to live up to it?  And what does it cost the women who, by choice or by circumstance, never become the good mother at all? GUESTS: Cristina Lledo Gomez Senior Lecturer in Catholic Systematic Theology at BBI – The Australian Institute of Theological Education. Author The Church as Woman and MotherDr Bronwyn Harman Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Edith Cowan University where she researches Australian motherhood and the "Good Mother Syndrome"Sheree Joseph Sydney writer, Author of the new memoir Juicy

Your phone will tell you the time, and that number has an extraordinary history.  And hasn't always been there.  Time used to be whatever the church bell said it was.  Time was rung, sung and prayed. It belonged to God.  Then we put time in a box on the wall. Then on our wrist. Now in our pocket and on our satellites.  Yet – there’s no expert consensus on whether time even flows from past present to future.  GUESTS: Kristie Miller is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney and co-director of the Centre for Time, and author of Out of Time and Does Tomorrow Exist?Matthew Champion is Associate Professor of History at the University of Melbourne and author of The Fullness of Time: Temporalities of the Fifteenth-Century Low Countries This program was recorded on the lands of the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation Its the third in our History Of... series History of Emotionsand History of Reality

Every civilisation that's ever existed has asked the same question: what's actually real?   Plato made the point that it's more than we can see with our own eyes.  Then came Newton, and reality became a clock with time.  Then came Einstein, and time started to bend. Then came quantum mechanics — and reality gets stranger still! Two astrophysicists go back to the beginning of humanity to ask "what did humans even mean by "real", before anyone had the maths to check?"  And is there a creator behind it all? GUESTS: Geraint Lewis, Professor of astrophysics at the University of Sydney, has spent his career hunting dark energy and dark matter — and doesn't believe in a God at the end of it. His new book is The Shortest History of Reality.His old friend and former student – now astrophysicist himself at Western Sydney University is Dr Luke Barnes, who works on the very same equations — and continues to believe it points to a creator.

If you hit your finger with a hammer, would you feel it the same way a medieval carpenter did, doing exactly the same thing?  Well, apparently not.  We think of our feelings as the most private and immediate things we own.  Hit your thumb, and YOU know pain when YOU feel it.   But historians of emotion say that's a modern conceit. Pain, grief, love, loneliness — none of them are fixed.   They're made, by religion, by culture and science, and most of all by the stories we tell each other about what a feeling is supposed to be.  Lets look into the history of feeling itself.  Were the emotions of the past even the same species of experience as ours?  GUESTS: Professor Katie Barclay is a Future Fellow in the Department of History and Archaeology, and author of Loneliness in World History  and Caritas: Neighbourly Love & the Early Modern SelfProfessor Stephanie Trigg, a Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Melbourne University. Among her near a dozen books is "Weeping Like a Beaten Child: Figurative Language and the Emotions in Chaucer and Malory."A/Prof Rob Boddice a historian of science, medicine and the emotions, based at Freie Universitaet Berlin and McGill University, Montreal, is author of Knowing Pain: A History of Sensation, Emotion, and Experience, and Research Fellow at the Uni of Helsinki in Finland.

Is racism about the colour of your skin, the history of colonialism, or the size of your bank account?

The White House has a cage fight on the Whitehouse front lawn while, somewhere, a father rose at 3am to feed a crying baby.     In 2026, what does it mean to be a good father, or a good man?  Does God, or any religious tradition, see men as something distinct? Or is “be a good man” just “be a good person”?  The manosphere claims religious sanction. Is that a corruption of these traditions, or an expression of them?  Three fathers, three frameworks. What do you or can you actually hand onto your son? GUESTS: Rev Dr Michael Jensen is an Anglican minister, an Oxford theologian, and a father of four. He’ll tell you God has a design for men — but hear him out, because I reckon it’s not what you’re expecting.A/Prof Adis Duderija is a scholar of Islam and gender at Griffith University — an expert on how his own tradition understands the rights and responsibilities of manhood. That too is more nuanced than its given credit for. And a father to two teenagers.Zac Seidler is a psychologist who studies what young men actually watch online. He’s professor at Orygen, Australia's Centre of Excellence in Youth Mental Health. And, as of this year, a brand-new dad.

Do to a dog what we do to a factory-farmed pig, and you’d be arrested.  Do it to ten thousand pigs in a shed, and it’s breakfast.  Most of us say cruelty to animals is wrong.  And then most of us are happy to have them killed and eat them.  Both our panellists think the way we treat animals is a moral catastrophe.  But they get there by opposite roads. One says animals matter because they suffer. The other says they matter because they’re God’s creatures.  GUESTS: Peter Singer Emeritus Professor of Bioethics, Princeton University. Host of the podcast Lives Well Lived. 50 years ago exactly, his book Animal Liberation launched the modern animal liberation movement as we know it. David Clough Professor of Theology and Applied Sciences, University of Aberdeen. Author of the two-volume work On Animals. He’s a Methodist Preacher and Co-founder of CreatureKind which aims to transform Christian attitudes and practices toward animals.

We are, it turns out, a species that refuses to believe its own birth certificate.  Australia is ageing, fast. This is not new here, or in Europe and North America where the trend has existed for decades.  But even in China and now India, the fertility rate has dropped below replacement levels – even the two most populous nations on earth are getting older.   Yet we’ve built a world — our economies, our cities, our pension systems, our cultures — around the young and the productive. So, what happens when that's no longer who we are?  GUESTS: Prof Paul Komesaroff is a philosopher at Monash University. And a practising endocrinologist. And Director of the Centre for Ethics in Medicine and Society.   Dr Lee-Fay Low is Professor in Ageing and Health at University of Sydney. She’s also a registered psychologist and chairs the Sydney Dementia Network.