Matters of Life and Death
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.
Episodes
October 8, 2025 • 65 mins
It has been hard to miss the ways that right-wing political movements have become marked by Christian rhetoric and language in recent years. Clearly, something about the unstable and fractious era we live in has seen people yearning to turn Western nations back to an imagined Christian past. But is this a mirage, or even an idolatrous worship of the nation state? How should Christians engage in politics in democracies? Is it helpfu...
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Natural disasters like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions have caused untold misery, suffering and death over the centuries. Some, like the infamous Lisbon earthquake and tsunami in 1755, have even been held up as prompting turns away from belief in God entirely. How can believers account for the apparent brokenness and destructiveness of the earth, and yet continue to believe it was made by a good God who declared his creation to ...
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September 24, 2025 • 51 mins
Christians often find themselves disagreeing about what posture to adopt in our increasingly secular and faith-hostile culture. Should we stand apart from society, keeping ourselves unsullied by its godlessness, so we can prophetically call out evil and witness to Christ? Or should we seek to engage deeply in our context, seeing our calling as to shape creation in a kingdom direction, acting incarnationally and incrementally for go...
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September 17, 2025 • 42 mins
Artificial Intelligence is everywhere these days, and the hospital, surgery and clinic are no different. It’s getting into wearable tech, it’s assisting in making diagnoses, and much more. There’s a lot of promise, but is there also some peril? What compromises around human connection and compassionate care might we make in our rush to integrate AI into healthcare? How can Christian doctors, nurses and others continue to embody Chr...
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September 10, 2025 • 54 mins
An influential Canadian doctors’ association has proposed expanding the country’s euthanasia laws so newborn babies suffering from serious disabilities could be given lethal drugs for the first time. In light of this, we discuss the often conflicting philosophies that lie behind our medical thinking on the unborn child versus newborn babies. What was so shocking and distinctive about how the early church treated babies so casually ...
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September 3, 2025 • 56 mins
We weren’t able to record an episode this week so please enjoy one from the MOLAD archive: This week’s guest is Nick Spencer, senior fellow at the faith thinktank Theos, and recent author of Magisteria: The entangled histories of science and religion. Nick joins us to discuss the complicated backstory to how we all came to believe science and faith were inevitably at odds with each other. Where did this myth come from, and what is ...
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August 27, 2025 • 62 mins
In today’s Q&A episode, we first explore a question sent in about a troubling story from Georgia, USA, where a braindead pregnant woman was kept on life-support for months (against the wishes of her family) in order that once her unborn child had developed sufficiently he could be born alive. The hospital reportedly believed it was compelled to do so thanks to Georgia’s strict anti-abortion laws which they feared would make doctors...
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August 20, 2025 • 60 mins
A doctor listener has written in with a fascinating question about miraculous healing. It was clearly a major part of Jesus’s ministry in the gospels, and yet she has doubts despite prayer for healing becoming a larger and larger part of her church’s life. Why is it that Jesus healed profound lifelong disabilities immediately and unambiguously, whereas so many healings today seem to be partial, gradual, and mostly concerned with in...
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August 13, 2025 • 68 mins
The prominent vaccine sceptic turned US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr is hard at work tearing apart America’s vaccine orthodoxy and establishment. For decades now questions have been raised about a supposed link between the MMR vaccine and autism. And the pandemic turbocharged vaccine hesitancy and the anti-vax movement. So what is the evidence that vaccination protects us from disease without causing us harm? Are the side e...
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As we’re on our summer hols, this week we’re bringing you a classic MOLAD episode from the archive. In October, the UK marks Baby Loss Awareness Week. There’s been an enormous cultural shift in recent decades around how society talks about miscarriage and stillbirth. Today, the messaging is much more compassionate and empathetic, acknowledging the reality of the baby who has died and the grief their parents will be feeling. In this...
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July 30, 2025 • 58 mins
For a technology that only really hit the public consciousness barely three years ago, AI is everywhere. Clearly it is useful, maybe even addictive, but can it also be harmful? Should we be concerned, as Christians, as creatives, as human beings even, at what AI is doing to crafts such as artistry, writing and more? No-one is arguing for a total firewall against AI, but is it possible to integrate it thoughtfully into our daily liv...
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July 23, 2025 • 45 mins
Today’s discussion begins with a maverick rival to the Olympics – The Enhanced Games – which will allow all its athletes to use whatever drugs or technology they want to try and boost their performance. It’s garnered a lot of support and investment from both Donald Trump-adjacent right-wing political forces, and techno-optimistic libertarian folk in Silicon Valley. The games themselves will act as a testbed for various kinds of bio...
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July 16, 2025 • 42 mins
In this Q&A episode we begin with a query from a listener who is agonising over whether to apply for work at a defence research institution. Can believers, even those who hold to just war theory, spend their careers helping create better ways for soldiers to kill? How can we know what God’s will for our lives are in general?
Then we move to a second question about a concerning story: a family using at-home DNA tests accidentally d...
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July 9, 2025 • 57 mins
In just his second day in the job, the new Pope Leo XIV dropped a fascinating hint as to what his priorities may be in the Vatican. It turns out he chose his name to honour the last Pope Leo XIII, who issued a famous and highly significant teaching document back in 1893. This not only laid out a new pro-worker approach from the Catholic Church at the height of the industrial revolution upending Western society, it also set the foun...
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July 2, 2025 • 45 mins
Last week we set the historical context of abortion law in the UK and how a sudden imposition of decriminalised abortion in 2019 in Northern Ireland set a precedent for what happened here in England a few weeks ago. But it’s hard to imagine the situation we have today also without the covid pandemic, which pro-abortion activists used skilfully to accelerate their plans to liberalise Britain’s abortion regime. How did the pills by p...
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June 25, 2025 • 50 mins
Without basically any public debate or meaningful legislative scrutiny, MPs in parliament passed a major reform to Britain’s abortion laws last week. Decriminalisation now means mothers cannot be prosecuted for aborting their unborn children all the way up to birth. This radical change has caught many onlookers on the hop – where has this come from? What will it change in practice? Why is it happening? Wasn’t abortion already legal...
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June 18, 2025 • 49 mins
This week we’re joined by the writer and podcaster Elizabeth Oldfield. Her new book Fully Alive is a series of essays trying to introduce riches of the Christian tradition and its wisdom on everything from feminism to loneliness to non-believers who may have never considered Christianity before. We discuss trying to tap into what many see as a crisis of meaning and associated new openness to faith in culture. Is there really, beyon...
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June 11, 2025 • 46 mins
Tim is on holiday, so today we’re bringing you a classic episode from the MOLAD archive.
The persecuted church today lives as it always has under the threat of arrest, imprisonment, physical attack, verbal threats and harassment, and even death. But today these traditional methods are supplemented by the technological revolution. Increasingly persecution comes via the internet, on social media platforms, and sometimes even via th...
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June 4, 2025 • 57 mins
Christianity is sometimes described as ‘bad news for women’. Clearly we would all disagree with this epithet, but why does it have cultural currency right now for a growing number of particularly younger women? In this episode we’re joined by Ellidh Cook, a student worker in central London whose theological studies focused on violence against women in the Old Testament, to discuss how she goes about showing women our faith is actua...
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Today we’re sharing an episode of the Faith in Parenting podcast, run by the Faith in Kids team, which we took part in some months ago. We were kindly asked on to chat about being Christians and being parents, and in particular how we handle sometimes tricky questions and issues that come up from the natural world and in science. And Tim got to share the good and the bad bits of being raised by John, and how science and sex and bod...
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