Podcast
Along with my son Tim Wyatt, a religion and social affairs journalist, I run a podcast called Matters of Life and Death, which is part of the Premier network. Each episode is a conversation between the two of us discussing how Christians can engage with a particular issue around healthcare, ethics, technology, science or faith. You can subscribe to the podcast on all major podcast apps, including Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Apple Podcasts, or you can listen to our latest episodes below.
In each episode of Matters of Life and Death, brought to you by Premier Unbelievable?, John Wyatt and his son Tim discuss issues in healthcare, ethics, technology, science, faith and more. John is a doctor, professor of ethics, and writer and speaker on many of these topics, while Tim is a religion and social affairs journalist. We talk about how Christians can better engage with a particular question of life, death or something else in between.
After decades of rapid expansion and booming student numbers, the British university sector is gripped by a financial crisis. Dozens of institutions are trying to make major cuts, gutting entire departments and making thousands of academic staff redundant. This week we are joined by two Christian university professors, who are each trying to face down their own university’s cuts to staff, to discuss the roots of this crisis, but also why it should matter to the church more broadly. We talk about the Christian origins of the idea of the university itself and how their goal to unveil knowledge about the world might be a surprisingly godly one. But we also discuss the growth of managers and administrators (something familiar to many denominations), if university education really is a universal public good, and if it was a mistake to turn universities from an elite pursuit for a tiny academically-minded minority into the default method of training young adults for the workplace.
The series of blogs on the university crisis recommended by Nick Megoran are here: https://isrf.org/search?q=&tags%5b%5d=he-dispatches&type=posts
John Heathershaw’s own writing on the topic is here: https://johnheathershaw.substack.com/p/the-crisis-in-britains-universities
• You can send in your questions for us to discuss on the podcast, or ideas for future episodes, to molad@premier.org.uk
• Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
• If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John’s website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
• Find some of Tim’s journalism and sign up for free to his weekly church news newsletter The Critical Friend: https://tswyatt.com
• For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com
To find a full list of our entire back catalogue of episodes, click here.
If you have enjoyed listening to Matters of Life and Death, please share it with your friends and family and leave a review in your podcast app. We are also very interested in hearing questions or comments from listeners, so if you have any thoughts or would like to suggest a topic for us to cover, please email molad@premier.org.uk.
