The Graham Joseph Hill Podcast

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 ...

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 loa...

What does it mean to be a strong man who follows Jesus? A Christian vision of manhood, purpose, and masculinity at its best. 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 wom...

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 ordinar...

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 chos...

Addiction often grows from shame and a hunger for relief, and recovery begins when grace meets us where we feel most ashamed. 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, ...

Most Christians now live in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and the Majority World church is reshaping global Christianity. What happens when the church you can see is shrinking, and the church you can't see is the largest it has ever been? In a country town in New South Wales, Australia, a woman counts nineteen heads in a hall that once held two hundred and tells the story as though it were Christianity itself. On t...

If you’re fighting an addiction, there’s a way to freedom, and this episode offers practical and spiritual help rooted in God’s grace. In July 2005, a pastor stood at his kitchen sink, poured a bottle of spirits down the drain, and fell to his knees on the floor and wept. He'd been preaching most Sundays for years, teaching in a theological college, and caring for a congregation, and drinking heavily every single...

Depression and anxiety touch faithful Christians too, and the Bible offers lament and a God who meets us in the depths. What happens when the person singing three rows back on a Sunday is using everything he has just to put his feet on the floor each morning? A man rings his pastor on a Tuesday and says he needs to tell him something, and asks him not to be shocked. He describes two years of mornings that felt like someone had pac...

What does it take to follow Jesus today? Ten movements of radical discipleship that shape a whole life around the way of Jesus. What happens when the good life your culture is selling you, the success, the status, the winning, turns out to be the very thing that costs you your soul? A skeptical teenager in the western suburbs of Sydney picks up the four Gospels to close the door on Christianity for good, and meets a Person on a ro...

Religion was meant to fade in the modern West, yet spiritual hunger keeps returning, and that raises big questions for the church. What happens when the story that was supposed to bury God starts to run out of road? A lifelong atheist, one of the sharpest people you'll meet, turns his coffee cup in his hands and admits he's begun to wonder whether we threw out some...

Single Christians often feel invisible at church, and the Bible offers a vision where singleness is honoured and everyone has a family. What happens when the church builds its life around marriage and the family, and treats everyone else as a guest still waiting in line? A woman, faithful for eleven years, tells her pastor she still feels like a problem nobody has ...

Christian nationalism fuses faith with national identity, and following Jesus means giving our first loyalty to the cross over the flag. What happens when the cross gets captured by the flag? A mob storms the Capitol carrying Jesus banners. A pastor watches his congregation confuse patriotism with faith. And the church faces a question it can no longer avoid.

Artificial intelligence is changing how we work, relate, and love, and Christian faith offers a way to stay fully human in an age of AI. What does it mean to be human when machines can do so much of what we thought made us human? A child asks Alexa to pray. A widow confides in a chatbot. And the church has an answer the world urgently needs.

Many Christians are deconstructing their faith or leaving evangelicalism altogether, and this episode asks where faith can go from here. What happens when the faith you were given as a child stops making sense? A migration is unfolding across Western Christianity, and the Christ-centered mystics saw it coming centuries ago. A word on where I stand. I...

A long-form Christian podcast on the Bible, theology, faith, justice, spirituality, culture, and the global church.

Graham Joseph Hill OAM PhD is an Australian theologian, the award-winning author of more than 30 books, and a recipient of the Medal of the Order of Australia for service to theological education. He researches and writes every episode himself, and each one is a solo, in-depth exploration tha...