A columnist’s job is to process deeper currents in news, politics, and culture – all in 800 words.

Who are we as a nation and a people, and what’s going on for us beneath the daily headlines of the 24/7 media cycle?

Few of us stop long enough to wonder – but if we ever wanted to find out, a good place to start would be Sean Kelly’s writing in The Sydney Morning Herald.

Sean Kelly is a former political staffer in the Rudd and Gillard governments, who now writes a weekly column on politics for The Sydney Morning Herald. He’s also the author of the book The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison.

Sean has a front row seat to what’s going on for us as a nation and combines that perspective with an insider’s view of how politics works. In this interview with Life & Faith he considers what it might mean to be considered a chronicler of the national soul.

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Sean Kelly’s column on how “kindness” won Anthony Albanese the 2025 Federal election.

His column about what might be called “the Albanese effect”: the move towards the centre, and the adoption of a less divisive tone, in the new leadership of the Greens and Liberal Party.

His book The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison

Stories and stats from the UK suggest that something has shifted, spiritually, over the past few years.

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Since 2018, two million more people in England and Wales have started regularly attending church – an increase fuelled largely by Gen Z, and by young men especially.

So say the results from a new survey conducted by YouGov on behalf of the British and Foreign Bible Society, results which cut across a bunch of our assumptions: that Western societies are on a secularising trajectory; that women are more religious than men; that young people are more likely to reject “traditional” beliefs such as Christianity.

In this episode of Life & Faith, we gather a few reports from abroad to get a handle on what’s happening in the UK, spiritually speaking. Vicar-in-training and Oxford research student Daniel Kim, who has written extensively about spirituality and occult beliefs in contemporary culture, talks about the spiritual openness of Gen Z. Bri Walsh, an Aussie who spent a season in London recently, offers an insider/outsider perspective on UK churchgoing in the 2020s. And Rob Barward-Symmons, co-author of The Quiet Revival – the report that puts concrete numbers to the anecdotal rumblings of the last few years – talks us through the data and what might be driving the recent surge in church attendance.

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Check out The Quiet Revival report, by Rob Barward-Symmons and Rhiannon McAleer, from British and Foreign Bible Society https://www.biblesociety.org.uk/research/quiet-revival

Read more from Daniel Kim about contemporary spirituality https://www.seenandunseen.com/contributors/daniel-kim

Got a burning creative project? Face your finitude, says this productivity expert, by learning to number your days.

Everyone is pressed for time, and in a never-ending quest to conquer their schedules. It’s why productivity tips and hacks are big business these days.

But underneath our productivity problem is a reality no one wants to face: the fact that we’re all going to die, argues self-described “recovering” productivity expert Oliver Burkeman, and the author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. The average human life is about 80 years, or some 4000 weeks, and the sooner we come to grips with the ultimate deadline, the better off we’ll be, argues Burkeman.

In this interview with Life & Faith, Oliver explains how “mortality” emerged as a theme for his 2021 book, how the solace of “deep time” – as experienced during times of flow, prayer, meditation, and hiking – connects us with our humanity, how AI might change the game for human creativity, and how he, as someone more drawn to Eastern religion, makes sense of our yearning for more time, for more than one life.

The shadow of Christianity – with its promise of transcendence, eternity, and being situated in an unfolding story that stretches before and after our earthly lives – looms over the conversation.

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Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals: A Four Week Guide to Doing What Counts

Oliver Burkeman’s website