With outrage and division at an all-time high, the need for intelligent and respectful persuasion has never been more urgent.

Michael McQueen is an author, speaker and social commentator. In an age of intense polarisation and tribalism, he hasn’t given up on the possibility of changing people’s minds. In this interview with Life & Faith, Michael talks about the psychology of stubbornness and how – even on tricky and controversial debates - we can build trust, strengthen relationships and move minds.

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Michael McQueen’s website: https://michaelmcqueen.net/

Check out Michael’s latest book Mindstuck: https://www.mindstuck.michaelmcqueen.net/

Take a look at this Google Talk by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, on his book as referenced in this episode: Thinking, Fast and Slow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjVQJdIrDJ0

That’s what disability advocate Emily Korir OAM calls one of the worst things that ever happened to her.

In June 2012, Emily Korir suffered a massive stroke. She was just 37 years old, with two young children. It was unclear whether she would survive; and then, whether she would ever walk or speak again. Her road to recovery was long and gruelling – and surprisingly life-giving, both for her and for others.

This was far from the first challenge Emily had faced in her life. Born of rape and raised in the slums of Kenya, her journey has been an unlikely one; as the title of her memoir attests, it has been Against All Odds: A Journey of Resilience, Identity & Success.

Emily was recently awarded an OAM (Order of Australia) for her service to people with a disability and to multicultural communities. In this conversation, she tells Life & Faith about how she ended up in Australia, why she calls what happened to her a “stroke of luck”, and how she is trying to change the narrative for people living with a disability.

“She [my grandmother] made me believe that nothing was impossible. She was a Christian woman and she made me believe that: never, ever to let anybody else’s perception of you become a reality.”

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Check out Emily Korir’s memoir Against All Odds

Learn more about the work of BET Group Global

How Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Huxley’s Brave New World, and Lewis’ That Hideous Strength predicted our current world disorder.

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Which vision – of a world gone sour – has proved prophetic?

Is it George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which introduced terms like “Big Brother”, “doublethink”, “thoughtcrime” to our vocabulary?

Or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where people exchange freedom for pleasure ... and everyone is too busy having a good time to worry about being manipulated?

Or is it C. S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength: the third book of Lewis’ “Ransom trilogy” or “Space Trilogy”, published 80 years ago this year?

In this episode of Life & Faith, we hear from three expert fans about how each book anticipated our times.

Peter Marks, Emeritus Professor in the Discipline of English and Writing at the University of Sydney, walks us through why Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is “news that has stayed news”, and how Apple, once the upstart defender of individuality, has become a Big Brother-type figure. Peter has written the books Imagining Surveillance: Eutopian and Dystopian Literature and Film and George Orwell the Essayist: Literature, Politics and the Periodical Culture.

Scott Stephens, Editor of ABC Religion & Ethics, and co-host with Waleed Aly of the podcast The Minefield, talks about the endless entertainment of Huxley’s Brave New World, and why he thinks Huxley could have invented the recommendation algorithm.

And Susannah Black Roberts, an essayist and editor of Plough Magazine in the United States, explores how C. S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength anticipated the transhuman ambitions of Silicon Valley, and why “staying human” is a way to survive the looming age of AI.

Explore

Why Peter Marks believes Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is “news that has stayed news”.

Matthew Purdy, in The New York Times, arguing: “We are all living in George Orwell’s world now”.

Episode of The Minefield podcast where Scott Stephens and Waleed Aly discuss Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and being on the brink of a world without books.

Susannah Black Roberts contributed an essay to this collection of writings on the Ransom Trilogy – Life on the Silent Planet: Essays on Christian Living from C. S. Lewis’ Ransom Trilogy

George Orwell’s review of Lewis’ That Hideous Strength

The Rolling Stone article by Miles Klee arguing “People are losing loved ones to AI-fuelled spiritual fantasies”

“They asked an AI