Christians still grieve, and Scripture gives us lament, the tears of Jesus, and a resurrection hope that carries us through loss.

It’s ten past three in the morning on a palliative care ward, and the only sounds are the hum of an oxygen machine and an old man’s breathing. His daughter has been holding his hand for nine hours when a night nurse leans in and says, “Keep talking to him, love. Hearing’s the last thing to go.” At twenty past four his breathing stops, and three days later a kind young funeral director slides a brochure across the desk for direct cremation: no service, no fuss. What does it look like to grieve with hope in a world that’s slowly forgetting how to mourn, and when we let go of the hand we’ve been holding, who’s holding us?

In this episode, Graham explores grief, lament, and the Christian hope of resurrection, starting with what sociologists call the sequestration of death, as dying moves into hospitals, mourning moves into private life, and grief tech offers chatbots and virtual reality versions of the dead. He traces how the early church called its burial grounds sleeping places, how Cyprian of Carthage buried the dead through a plague, and how Augustine wept for his mother Monica, and he sets today’s griefbots beside the spiritualism that boomed after the First World War. He walks through Abraham mourning Sarah, David’s cry for Absalom, the psalms of lament, Lamentations, Jesus weeping at the tomb of Lazarus, and Paul’s call to grieve with hope in 1 Thessalonians 4 and 1 Corinthians 15. He engages with voices like Martin Luther, C. S. Lewis, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Kwame Bediako, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, George Bonanno, and Margaret Stroebe, and faces the hardest objections directly: the platitudes that wound grieving people, Freud and Ernest Becker on hope as wish fulfilment, and the question of loved ones who die without faith. Drawing on mourning traditions from Ghana, Aotearoa New Zealand, the Philippines, and Tonga, along with Jewish shiva and Orthodox memorial prayers, he offers practical steps for churches and individuals, from lament services and a three-month, six-month, and one-year pattern of care to saying aloud the name of someone who’s died. And he asks what it means to be held by the risen Jesus once we’ve let go.

If you’d like to go further on faith and mental health, Graham’s earlier episode, Depression, Anxiety, and Faith: The Weight, makes a good companion to this one.

Book recommendations: “Lament for a Son” by Nicholas Wolterstorff, “A Grace Disguised: How the Soul Grows through Loss” by Jerry Sittser, and “Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church” by N. T. Wright.

Email us at GrahamPodcast@icloud.com

See my Substack: https://grahamjosephhill.substack.com/

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It’s night at the Jabbok, a river that cuts through a gorge east of the Jordan, and a man has just sent his wives, his children, and everything he owns across the ford in the dark. Tomorrow he has to face the brother he cheated twenty years ago. Then someone grabs him in the dark, and they wrestle until dawn, and he walks away with a new name and a limp he’ll carry for the rest of his life. How does God keep a promise when the people carrying it are this compromised, this frightened, and this much like us?

In this episode, Graham walks through Genesis 12 to 36, the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and asks whether God’s promise can survive the family carrying it. He traces the promise from the call of Abram and the covenant between the pieces, through Hagar naming God as the one who sees her, the hospitality at Mamre and the bargaining over Sodom, to Jacob’s stolen blessing, the stairway at Bethel, and his tearful reunion with Esau, showing how the promise is threatened on almost every page and kept by God every time. He faces the hardest story in the section, the binding of Isaac in Genesis 22, alongside Kierkegaard, Kant, Jon Levenson, and Phyllis Trible, and handles the stories of Hagar, Sodom, and Dinah directly. He engages with voices like Martin Luther, Andrei Rublev, Delores Williams, Kenneth Kitchen, and the Bethlehem pastor Munther Isaac on the historicity of the patriarchs, Paul and James on Abraham’s faith, and the promise of the land. And reading these chapters against an age of estrangement and a culture that only knows how to celebrate or cancel its heroes, he gives a four-week plan for reading them yourself and asks what it means to walk away from God blessed and limping at the same time.

This is the second of three episodes on Genesis, part of a series on the podcast that takes whole books of the Bible one at a time, and the first covers Genesis 1 to 11.

Book recommendations: “Africa Bible Commentary” edited by Tokunboh Adeyemo, “Genesis 12-36” by Claus Westermann, and “The Theology of the Book of Genesis” by R. W. L. Moberly.

Email us at GrahamPodcast@icloud.com

See my Substack: https://grahamjosephhill.substack.com/

Podcast links: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GrahamJosephHillPodcast Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7aqTMTcoYPcvneL4xg4Ohv Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast/id1890838919 Podbean: https://www.podbean.com/pw/pbblog-tsqgs-1534f12 Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/271b0dd3-990d-41e6-b4ba-3fd4bcf78cef iHeartRadio: https://iheart.com/podcast/329136112 Player FM: https://player.fm/series/3726148 Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast-6435212 Boomplay: https://www.boomplaymusic.com/podcasts/143800

How social media and algorithms capture your attention, and a Christian response grounded in Scripture and spiritual practice. It's Friday afternoon in Jerusalem, around 430 years before Christ, and merchants from Tyre are selling fish at the city gates as the Sabbath draws near. The governor, Nehemiah, orders the gates shut, and the next week the merchants come back and camp outside the wall in the dark, waiting for someone to slip out and buy. Today the merchants don't camp outside the wall. They've moved into the house, the bedroom, and the pocket, and the thing they're selling is us.

In this episode, Graham explores social media, the attention economy, and what both are doing to the Christian soul, through the lens of Scripture, theology, history, and cultural analysis. He starts with Australia's world-first ban on social media for under-sixteens and the regulator's finding that most teenagers are still online, then traces the attention trade back through Benjamin Day's penny newspaper and the Great Moon Hoax of 1835, Luther's pamphlet wars, and Benedict's Rule. He follows the biblical thread from Nehemiah shutting the gates, to the command to guard your heart in Proverbs, to Jesus' teaching on the single eye, to Paul refusing to be mastered by anything, and on to the new Jerusalem whose gates are never shut. He engages with voices like Augustine, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Jacques Ellul, Kosuke Koyama, and James K. A. Smith, alongside the work of Shoshana Zuboff on surveillance capitalism, Anna Lembke on dopamine and compulsion, and Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski on how contested the research on screens and wellbeing really is. He offers a five-question digital rule of life drawn from his book Digital Monasticism, with practical steps for individuals, families, and churches in settings from Sydney to Jakarta to Nairobi. And he asks who your attention belongs to, what the hunger to be seen is really a hunger for, and how to guard the gates when the merchants are already inside the walls.

Book recommendations: "The Attention Merchants" by Tim Wu, "The Anxious Generation" by Jonathan Haidt, "The Tech-Wise Family" by Andy Crouch, and "Digital Monasticism" by Graham Joseph Hill

Email us at GrahamPodcast@icloud.com

See my Substack: https://grahamjosephhill.substack.com/

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