The Graham Joseph Hill Podcast

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 tax...

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 ha...

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 tha...

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 that very same Sunday, in Lagos and Nairobi and Seoul and São Paulo and Chennai, churches are packed to the doors and spilling ...

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 day for about a decade while almost nobody knew. Someone in your church is living in that same gap this week. They're setting up the chairs, running the ...

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 packed his chest with wet sand. He'd been smiling at the church door through all of it, week after week, and nobody had any ...

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 road instead. The first followers of Jesus were called people of "the Way," and forty years later, Graham is still walking it. In...

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 something we needed. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, once a leading atheist, announces she's now a Christian, and Richard Dawkins calls himself a cultu...

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 worked out how to solve. A widower watches the casseroles stop two weeks after the funeral. And a church that follows a single Saviour, a...

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.

In this episode, Graham explores Christian nationalism and populism through ...

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.

In this episode, Graham explores artificial intelligence through t...

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 hold that the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments are the inspired and infallible Word of God, written by holy people carried a...

Conversations about 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 educa...