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/

Podcast links:

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GrahamJosephHillPodcast

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7aqTMTcoYPcvneL4xg4Ohv

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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/

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

What do Genesis 1 to 11 teach about creation, the image of God, sin, and the flood, and why does it matter for human dignity today?

It's November 1872, in a back room of the British Museum. A man named George Smith, who left school at fourteen and taught himself cuneiform in his lunch breaks, is bent over a clay tablet dug out of the ruins of Nineveh. He starts to read a story about a man told to build a boat, who loads it with his family and living creatures of every kind, who survives a flood, and who sends out birds to see whether the waters have gone down. The story goes that he leapt up, ran about the room, and started tearing off his clothes. A flood story older than Genesis.

In this episode, Graham takes the first eleven chapters of Genesis and asks what kind of book this is and what it's actually telling us. He walks the whole shape of the primeval history, from the seven days and the image of God, through the garden and the first murder, to the flood, the Table of Nations, and Babel, and shows how each act of judgement in these chapters comes with a token of mercy attached. He sets Genesis beside the Babylonian texts it shares a world with, Enuma Elish and Atrahasis, where the world is made from a dead goddess and humans exist as the gods' labour force, and lets the differences make the argument. He engages with voices like Origen, Augustine, Ephrem the Syrian, Rashi, Gordon Wenham, and John Walton, alongside the disputes that actually divide readers today, on authorship and the documentary hypothesis, the genre of the seven days, the historical Adam, and the extent of the flood, with the strongest form of each position given fairly. He faces the hardest material directly, including the flood itself and the curse of Canaan, a passage used for four centuries to justify slavery and apartheid. And he gives a four-week plan for reading these eleven chapters yourself, and asks what it means that every person you'll ever meet carries the image of God.

This is the first in a monthly series on the podcast taking a whole book of the Bible at a time. Once a month I set the headlines aside and we read one book properly, from its own world outward. If you'd like to go through Scripture this way day by day, the companion devotional series, Dwelling in God's Word, walks book by book from Genesis to Revelation, and you can find it here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HHWR9FRX

Book recommendations:

"Genesis" by Tremper Longman III, "Genesis 1-15" by Gordon J. Wenham, and "The Lost World of Genesis One" by John H. Walton.

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

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Boomplay: https://www.boomplaymusic.com/podcasts/143800

A man books the small chapel, the one they use when hardly anyone is expected, because his father was a fitter and turner who never ran anything and never won anything. Then people start arriving, and they keep arriving, until they're standing along the back wall and out into the corridor. A woman in her seventies takes his hand and tells him his father mowed her lawn every fortnight for eleven years after her husband died, and never mentioned it to anybody. That night he rings a friend and says, I had no idea who my father was.

In this episode, Graham explores manhood and the one question beneath all the noise on the subject: what a man's strength is for, through the lens of Scripture, theology, history, and cultural analysis. He traces the biblical answer from the two verbs God gives the first man in Genesis, to serve and to guard, through Lamech turning strength into a threat and David sparing a sleeping king, to Jesus settling the question of his own power in the desert before performing a single miracle, to the towel and basin on the last night of his life, and to Peter restored beside a charcoal fire. He engages with voices like Augustine on the lust to dominate, Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the man for others, Aelred of Rievaulx on friendship between men, and the chivalric and futuwwa traditions, alongside the research of Richard Reeves on boys and men, Niobe Way on the friendships boys bury in adolescence, and Terrence Real on how male depression hides itself. He looks honestly at the numbers on male suicide, loneliness, and help-seeking, at the two stories on offer to young men and why both fail, and at practices from Men's Sheds to men's fellowships in African and Latin American churches. And he asks what your strength actually is, who it's currently pointed at, and what it would take to redirect it this week.

Book recommendations:

"Of Boys and Men" by Richard V. Reeves, "Letters and Papers from Prison" by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and (forthcoming) "What Your Strength Is For" by Graham Joseph Hill.

If you're struggling, please reach out.

In Australia, Lifeline is on 13 11 14, MensLine Australia on 1300 78 99 78, Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, and 13YARN on 13 92 76 for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander listeners. For alcohol or other drugs, the National Alcohol and Other Drug Hotline is 1800 250 015.

In the United States, call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, text HOME to 741741 for the Crisis Text Line, or call 1-800-662-HELP (4357) for the SAMHSA National Helpline.

If your life is in immediate danger, call 000 in Australia or 911 in the United States. Wherever you're listening, please find your local service and talk to your doctor or someone you trust.

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

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When Jesus said to give Caesar what is Caesar’s, he redrew the line between faith and politics, and between church and state.

A Roman denarius is small and silver and warm from someone's pocket, and stamped on it is the face of Tiberius with an inscription calling him the son of the divine Augustus and the greatest high priest of the world. In Mark's Gospel, religious leaders and political operatives who ordinarily can't stand each other come together for one afternoon with a single goal: to destroy a carpenter's son with a question about taxes. Say yes and you've sold out your people to the occupying army. Say no, and there's a Roman soldier close enough to hear you. And Jesus says, bring me a coin, whose image is this?

In this episode, Graham explores church and state, political loyalty, and how Christians can be good citizens without handing their souls to a party, a president, or a flag, through the lens of Scripture, theology, history, and cultural analysis. He traces the biblical argument from Israel demanding a king in 1 Samuel and the limits Deuteronomy placed on royal power, to Daniel serving an empire while refusing to bow and Jeremiah telling exiles to seek the good of Babylon, to Romans 13 and Revelation 13 sitting side by side with the state as God's servant and the state as a beast, to Jesus standing before Pilate and telling a governor where his authority came from. He engages with voices like Augustine, Thomas Helwys, Abraham Kuyper, Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Martin Luther King Jr., alongside the research of Lilliana Mason on political identity, Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry on Christian nationalism, and Robert Putnam on the hollowing out of civic life. He draws examples from Rome and Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa and the black church in the United States, Leipzig in 1989 and Manila in 1986, and from Nigeria, India, China, Brazil, Britain, and Australia today. And he asks what Caesar can rightly claim from us, where those claims stop, and what it costs a church when politics stops being a subject and starts being a religion.

Book recommendations:
"A Public Faith" by Miroslav Volf, "Resident Aliens" by Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, "Mission Between the Times" by C. René Padilla, and "Kingdom or Empire?" by Graham Joseph Hill.

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
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Boomplay: https://www.boomplaymusic.com/podcasts/143800

Contemplative prayer is the ancient Christian practice of resting in God’s presence, and it’s a way back to stillness for distracted minds.

Put a person in a bare room with nothing but their own thoughts and a button that delivers a mild electric shock they'd already said they'd pay to avoid. Leave them there for fifteen minutes. In a study published in the journal Science, a striking number of people chose to shock themselves instead of sitting in silence: two-thirds of the men, and a quarter of the women. When we've lost the capacity to be still, what happens to our prayer, and what happens to us?

In this episode, Graham explores contemplative prayer, the ancient Christian practice of silence and loving attention to God, through the lens of Scripture, theology, history, and cultural analysis. He traces the practice from Elijah meeting God in the thin silence at Horeb, to the stillness of the Psalms and Jesus rising before dawn to pray in a deserted place, to Mary sitting at Jesus' feet and the Spirit who prays within us in Romans 8, and he grounds the whole thing in the gospel of grace and the life of the Triune God. He engages with voices like Evagrius Ponticus, who named our distraction seventeen centuries early, alongside Augustine, Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, Thomas Merton, and Simone Weil, together with the research of Timothy Wilson, Byung-Chul Han, and Cal Newport on attention, distraction, and the machine built to capture it. He offers practices you can start this week, from two minutes of silence to lectio divina, the Jesus Prayer, and the daily examen, and he looks honestly at the evangelical worries about contemplative prayer before answering them from inside the faith. And he asks what we lose when we can't be still, whether the God who spoke to Elijah in the thin silence is still speaking, and how a distracted people might learn to listen again.

Book recommendations: "Invitation to Solitude and Silence" by Ruth Haley Barton, "The Way of the Heart" by Henri Nouwen, "The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry" by John Mark Comer, and "Digital Monasticism" by Graham Joseph Hill.

Email us at GrahamPodcast@icloud.com

See my Substack with an article related to this episode:
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
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Boomplay: https://www.boomplaymusic.com/podcasts/143800

It's a Tuesday night in 2004. A pastor sits in his study with the door shut, a half-finished sermon on Isaiah 61 on the desk in front of him, freedom for the captives, release for the prisoners, and a glass in his hand. People in his church say he's the most spiritually alive person they know, and he's been drinking heavily every single day for years while almost nobody has the faintest idea. He's convinced himself that the day his church finds out is the day his ministry ends.

In this episode, Graham tells his own story of addiction and recovery, and builds from it a theology of grace and a picture of the church as a place where honesty is survivable. Unpacking the material from his book "Unshackled", Graham offers an account of addiction that holds four things together at once: a neurochemical dependence, an emotional refuge, a relational pattern, and a spiritual vacuum, and reads it through Augustine's restless heart in the Confessions, addiction as disordered love and a counterfeit sacrament. He works the Scriptures that recovery recognizes immediately, from the thirst of Psalm 42 and the cracked cisterns of Jeremiah 2, to Paul doing the very thing he hates in Romans 7, to the confession that heals in James 5:16, to grace made perfect in weakness in 2 Corinthians 12. He draws on Gerald May and Gabor Maté and the trauma research of Bessel van der Kolk, traces how Alcoholics Anonymous grew out of a Christian movement built on confession and surrender, and names the Australian picture with unusual candor, from the Rum Rebellion to a gambling economy that runs on the pokies and concentrates the harm in the most vulnerable communities. And he asks what it would take for a congregation to name addiction from the front, in the same tone it uses for grief or cancer, before anyone in the room has had to ask for help.

Book recommendations: "Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions" by Gerald G. May, "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction" by Gabor Maté, and "Unshackled: Breaking Addiction's Chains Through God's Grace" by Graham Joseph Hill.

If you're struggling, please reach out. In Australia, Lifeline is on 13 11 14, the National Alcohol and Other Drug Hotline on 1800 250 015, and Alcoholics Anonymous on 1300 222 222. In the United States, call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or 1-800-662-HELP (4357) for the SAMHSA National Helpline. All are free, confidential, and answered around the clock. Wherever you're listening, please find your local equivalents and talk to your doctor or a trusted person.

Email us at GrahamPodcast@icloud.com

See my Substack with an article related to this episode: 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