Stan Grant is a man of remarkable intellect, profound story and deep faith.
On a late winter's afternoon recently, I meet Stan in a moment when he is on a difficult journey through a kind of lament - deeply contemplating the three big disciplines that have steeled his extraordinary life and work - physics, philosophy and theology.
Stan says since the Voice to Parliament Referendum he’s been taking time to take stock, that he’s done too much time plucking the wings off butterflies - and that right now he’d rather write beauty into the world.
So he’s been working on a new book that is a meditation on time, on God, on the temporal nature of our being and on the complex state of our modern world.
There is plenty for Stan to sit with and sort through right now.
As a journalist and correspondent who covered war for 40 years, he's seen the worst of what we can do to each other but he has also seen love endure in the most Godforsaken of places. So he knows first-hand the paradoxical contradictions of what it means to be a human in a world like ours.
Stan believes it's essential we all have something bigger than ourselves to believe in because if the human being is the limit, then we will only see the limits of the human.
And in a world so often consumed by the chaos of modernity, ongoing conflicts and the binaries of identity, Stan Grant is keenly focussed these days on kindling what we share rather than what divides us for, as Franz Kafka said, identity is a cage in search of a bird.
I'd love you to listen to this episode of Human Cogs podcast as we journey with Stan through his rivers and eddies of thought, where philosophy, theology and the mystical realm converge to offer a deeper understanding of Stan Grant the mortal, what might lie beyond this life, and how we humans can all - somehow - someday - find our place in the untold cosmos.
Guest: Stan Grant, Award-winning Journalist, Author, Writer, Poet and Vice Chancellor's Chair of Australian-Indigenous Belonging at Charles Sturt University.
Host: Madeleine Hanger (Grummet)
Producer: Audio Superstar Daryl Missen
*****
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