Soul Search

Greta Gerwig is one of Hollywood’s buzziest directors today. After her smash-hit Barbie, audiences are hotly anticipating her next movie, Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew. But some fans of CS Lewis’ original book are upset that the lion Aslan – a Christ-figure – is being voiced by Meryl Streep.
Critics say associating the Christian God with the feminine is a modern ‘woke’ innovation... but what if it’s not? How do the metaphors we use to talk about God, shape our spiritual beliefs and practices?
Guests
Adrian Drayton is a writer and critic interested in religion on screen, and in the connections between faith and popular culture. Formerly of the Uniting Church magazine Insights, now you can find him on Substack at The Long Conversation.
Rev Dr Sally Douglas is Lecturer of New Testament Studies at Pilgrim Theological College at the University of Divinity and the author of Early Church Understandings of Jesus as the Female Divine. Her latest book is Rewilding Prayer: God Beyond Gender, Faith Beyond Formulas.
More information
Narnia: Magician’s Nephew official trailer
Insights Magazine: Greta Gerwig Opens the Door to a Very Different Narnia | Insights Magazine
The Long Conversation: Greta Gerwig’s Narnia and What Happens When You Try to Film Wonder?
More from Soul Search
Zeus' Law — Hospitality in Homer's Odyssey - ABC listen
Big questions in books — Sacredness, enchantment and the apocalypse, from Narnia to Harry Potter - ABC listen
Imagining Jesus on screen and in literature - ABC listen
More from Radio National
Greta Gerwig and critics discuss Barbie and Oppenheimer - ABC listen

Across the Middle East, desert caves and ancient monasteries hid troves of ancient manuscripts. Now, advances in machine learning are helping scholars to unlock these ancient texts and the lost religious worlds that produced them.

Saint Hildegard of Bingen is perhaps Medieval Europe's most remarkable woman. She was a prolific writer, a theologian, a mystic, and Europe's first known female composer. It been about 1000 years since she lived, but why is the music she wrote so popular today?
Guests: 
Jennifer Bain is a professor from Dalhousie University in Canada. Jennifer edited the Cambridge Companion to Hildegard of Bingen, and she's also the author of several works on Hildegard's music and its reception.
Sylvia MacRitchie-Hook did postgraduate research about Hildegard as a Ramsay Scholar at the Australian Catholic University. Her thesis is Art as Revelation: A Theological Aesthetic Reading of Hildegard of Bingen's Scivias.
More info: 
The isolation and imagination of the first female English author (Soul Search)
Hilda-thon! Eight hours of music by Hildegard von Bingen (ABC Classic)

Stories about gardening run deep in many cultures – from the garden of the gods in the epic of Gilgamesh, to the garden of Eden in the biblical book of Genesis. Gardening is also a practice that, for some people, connects the body, soil and soul. On Soul Search Costa Georgiadis shares about the life lessons he's learnt from gardening. 
Guest: 
Costa Georgiadis, presenter of Gardening Australia and the author of Costa’s World: Gardening for the soil, the soul and the suburbs.
More info: 
How gardening is a conversation (ABC Listen)
The science and spirituality of soil (ABC Listen)
Costa Georgiadis visits remote NT communities to teach kids about gardening and healthy foods (ABC News)

In today's fast-paced, tech-saturated society, is it possible to live a life of fulfilment? Until his recent death, the writer, farmer and sustainability activist Wendell Berry believed that life's meaning came from cultivating the land and building meaningful relationships with one another.