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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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 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

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

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 into the street. The center of the Christian faith has moved, and most of us who grew up in Western churches were never told.

In this episode, Graham explores world Christianity, the astonishing shift of the faith toward Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific, through the lens of Scripture, theology, history, and cultural analysis. He lays out the numbers, from 381 million European Christians in 1900 to a Global South (i.e., Majority World) that now holds most of the world's believers and is projected to hold 77 percent by 2050, and the prediction that China will soon have more Christians than any nation on earth. He traces the long story, from Antioch and the African theology of Augustine and Athanasius, to the Church of the East reaching Xi'an in the seventh century, to the Thomas Christians of Kerala, and shows how the center of this faith has always moved. He grounds it in Scripture, from the promise to Abraham that all the families of the earth would be blessed, to Pentecost and the languages God multiplied instead of erasing, to the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15, to Paul's prayer in Ephesians 3 that we might grasp the love of Christ together with all the saints. He engages with voices such as Lamin Sanneh, Andrew Walls, Philip Jenkins, Kōsuke Koyama, Kwame Bediako, and Emmanuel Katongole, and he's honest about the hard questions, too: nominal growth, the prosperity gospel, and the danger of romanticizing the Majority World church. And he asks what all this means for a shrinking church in western Sydney, and for anyone who spent a lifetime assuming they were standing at the center.

Book recommendations: "World Christianity: An Introduction" by Graham Joseph Hill, "Global Christianity" and "Women in World Christianity" by Gina Zurlo, "Whose Religion Is Christianity? The Gospel beyond the West" by Lamin Sanneh, "The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity" by Philip Jenkins.

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

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 sound desk, teaching the four-year-olds, and going home to something they can't put down. In this episode, Graham tells his own story of addiction and recovery, and builds from it a theology of grace and a set of practices for the church. He's now been sober for more than twenty years, and he got there through God's grace, through his wife and family, through a doctor and a psychiatrist and a Christian counsellor, and through a church that carried him when he couldn't carry himself. 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, addiction as disordered love and misplaced worship, and the freedom of the one whom the Son sets free. He's honest about the second turning point, the ten years he stayed silent about the depression underneath the drinking, and about why so many people in our pews stay silent too, having noticed which sins get named from the pulpit with sympathy and which get named with contempt. He gives concrete practices a congregation can adopt this year, naming addiction from the front, knowing what to do when someone tells you, caring for the family, and supporting the leader who's struggling, and he names the wider picture too, including the conflict of interest that keeps gambling harm flowing through the most vulnerable communities in Australia. And he asks what it would take for a church to become a place where honesty is survivable. Book recommendation: "Unshackled: Breaking Addiction's Chains Through God's Grace" by Graham Joseph Hill, written after twenty years of sobriety for anyone still in the grip of something they can't put down. It walks through eight movements from denial to surrender, healing, forgiveness, amends, new habits, and community, with appendices mapping the Twelve Steps and the clinical picture. See the book on Amazon here: https://a.co/d/00Pdxeg6 If you're struggling, please reach out. In Australia: Lifeline 13 11 14, the National Alcohol and Other Drug Hotline 1800 250 015, Family Drug Support 1300 368 186, Gambling Help 1800 858 858, and Alcoholics Anonymous 1300 222 222. In the United States: 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and 1-800-662-HELP (4357) for the SAMHSA National Helpline, with Al-Anon at al-anon.org and AA at aa.org. Every one of these is free, confidential, and answered around the clock. Wherever you're listening from, 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