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Matters of Life and Death

Listen in as we discuss issues in healthcare, ethics, technology, science, faith and more. We unpack how Christians can better engage with questions of life, death and anything in between.

Listen to the Matters of Life and Death Podcast

Brought to you by Premier Unbelievable and hosted by John Wyatt and his son Tim. John is a doctor, professor of ethics, and writer and speaker on these topics, while Tim is a religion and social affairs journalist.

Mental health 1: Power dynamics, the psychiatrist as brick wall, casualties of social media, and over-pathologising distress

Since the covid pandemic there has been an alarming rise in people presenting with mental health problems. Today we speak with Christian... Posted: November 30, 2022

Dependence 2: The Panopticon at home, evangelising to retirees, existential angst in the House of Lords, and rejecting self-sufficiency

In the second part of our conversation on ageing and dependence, we think about how secular society has tried to ameliorate the crisis of... Posted: November 23, 2022

Dependence 1: Isolated elderly people, altruistic suicide, a second childhood, and a crucified hero

We’ve discussed in previous episodes the looming ‘demographic timebomb’ – a growing mass of elderly and increasingly chronically... Posted: November 16, 2022

Protestant Social Teaching 2: The ars moriendi, open casket funerals in Derry Girls, the end of Christendom and ethical quietism

Resuming our conversation with Rhys Laverty from the Davenant Institute, we look at John’s contribution to the Protestant Social... Posted: November 9, 2022

Protestant Social Teaching 1: Overlap with Catholicism, chronological snobbery, rejecting one-size-fits-all ethics, and ‘worldly’ versus ‘spiritual’ matters

Over 150 years the Catholic Church has built up a body of ethical doctrine commonly known as Catholic Social Teaching, which applies... Posted: November 2, 2022

AI sentience 2: I-Thou relationships, talking to stuffed animals, thanking Alexa, and Turing red flag laws

Building on last week’s discussion of AI chatbots, we consider the theology and sociology of why interacting with other human beings is... Posted: October 26, 2022

AI sentience 1: Blake Lemoine and LaMDA, trillions of words, mute idols, and the God who speaks

Earlier this year, a Google engineer went public with his concerns an artificial intelligence... Posted: October 19, 2022

Matters of Life and Death: The book reconsidered, the Moscow State University reading list, audiobooks, and the decline of the reading Christian

Twenty-four years ago, John published the book which gave this podcast its name: Matters of Life and Death. His first foray into... Posted: October 12, 2022

Embryology 2: Psalm 139, reconsidering ‘ensoulment’, the language of right and wrong, and co-operation with evil

Building on last week’s whistlestop tour through the latest ground-breaking embryo research, in this episode we consider what we should... Posted: October 5, 2022

Embryology 1: A stem cell ‘Mini Me’, CRISPR, Brave New World, and extending the 14-day limit

There has been a flood of highly significant if poorly reported developments in embryo research in recent years, all of which raise new... Posted: September 28, 2022