Julia Verdouw used silence, faith and writing poetry to survive the sudden death of her husband.

Julia is an accomplished academic and policy expert, but her book In the Valley of the Shadow may be her most important work. Through reflection, poetry and prayers, the book documents her journey of grief.

Regardless of who we are or what we believe, suffering comes for us all. Perhaps the worst kind of suffering is the grief that we face when we lose someone we love. How can we navigate such immense loss and deep sorrow?

In this episode, we explore Julia’s journey of finding comfort, strength, hope, and even redemption, through the deepest suffering.

EXPLORE

Purchase Julia’s book through her website

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.

Explore

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.

Explore:

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