The Graham Joseph Hill Podcast
A theologian who’s done the reading, following the Jesus Way through the Bible and the hardest questions facing Christians and the world, with depth, honesty, and hope.
I’m Graham Joseph Hill, and I research and write every episode myself, then think it through with you the way two people might talk across a kitchen table. These are long-form, deeply researched explorations of Scripture, faith, justice, spirituality, culture, and the global church. You won’t always land where I land, and that’s the point.
The podcast alternates between two kinds of episodes. Every second episode opens the Bible, taking a book, a section, or a single passage and working through it with care: its world, its shape, its hard edges, how the church has read it across centuries and cultures, and what it asks of us now. Over the coming years, we’ll move through the whole of Scripture this way, from Genesis to Revelation, and then on to further biblical passages and themes. The episodes in between each take on a topic. There, I’ll lay out the strongest case on every side, go deep into what the Bible and the Christian tradition actually say, draw in history, philosophy, science, and sociology, and ask what it all means for how we live now. Every episode ends where I believe the gospel leads: in hope. And I close each one by recommending three books that have shaped my thinking, in case you want to go further.
The topical episodes take on the questions people are genuinely wrestling with. Faith and honest doubt. Anxiety, grief, burnout, and the care of the soul. The global church, and what Majority World Christians can teach the West. Following Jesus in a post-Christian Australia. Power, gender, sexuality, and who gets to lead. Technology and the shape of the human person. Justice for refugees, the poor, the imprisoned, and the land. Science and the case for God. Politics when the nation pulls the church sideways. Indigenous justice and reconciliation. And the slow, steady work of prayer and formation. No topic is off limits.
If you’re looking for Christianity engaged with mind and heart together, thoughtful, fair to the people it disagrees with, grounded in Scripture, honest about the hardest things, and alive to the present moment, you’ll be at home here.
Graham Joseph Hill (OAM, PhD) is an Australian theologian and the author of more than thirty books, and an Adjunct Research Fellow and Associate Professor in the School of Theology at Charles Sturt University.
See my Substack, grahamjosephhill.substack.com. Follow the podcast so you don’t miss an episode. If something here resonates, share it with someone who needs it. And if you’ve got a question you’d like me to take on, or a topic you wish I’d explore, email me at GrahamPodcast@icloud.com.
Where to Listen:
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 word on where I stand. I hold that the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments are the inspired and infallible Word of God, written by holy people carried along by the Holy Spirit, and that they carry supreme authority in all matters of faith and conduct. This episode asks how we read Scripture faithfully, and it questions one particular approach that treats the Bible as a flawless instruction manual, clear on every question and flat across every page. The authority of Scripture holds firm through that whole conversation, and the tradition offers ancient and generous ways of reading the text that make room for our hardest questions and our deepest trust at the same time. I'm writing from inside historic Christian faith, shaped by the Nicene, Apostles', and Chalcedonian creeds, and centred on Jesus Christ, crucified and risen for us.
Episodes
Jul 21, 2026
Jul 21, 2026
1 hr 11 min
Depression and anxiety touch faithful Christians too, and the Bible offers lament and a God who meets us in the depths.What happens when the person singing three rows back on a Sunday is using everything he has just to put his feet on the floor each morning? A man rings his pastor on a Tuesday and says he needs to tell him something, and asks him not to be shocked. He describes two years of mornings that felt like someone had packed his chest with wet sand. He'd been smiling at the church door through all of it, week after week, and nobody had any idea.
In this episode, Graham explores faith, anxiety, and depression through the lens of Scripture, theology, history, and cultural analysis. He shows how honestly the Bible carries mental suffering, from the psalmist asking why his nephesh is cast down, to the deep calling to deep in Psalm 42 where the word is tehom, the chaos waters of Genesis, to Psalm 88 ending in the dark with no resolution and God letting it stand, to Elijah under the broom tree being given sleep and food before anything else, to Jesus in Gethsemane perilypos, his soul surrounded on every side by sorrow. He opens up the Greek merimnaō behind "do not be anxious," and the ancient diagnosis of acedia that Evagrius and John Cassian mapped in the desert centuries before we had our language for it. He tells the story of Charles Spurgeon, the most famous preacher of his age, who knew despair from the inside, and engages with voices like Martin Luther, William Cowper, Julian of Norwich, Kathryn Greene-McCreight, Kelly Kapic, and Walter Brueggemann, alongside the research and reflection of Viktor Frankl, Curt Thompson, Jonathan Haidt, and Andrew Solomon. He's fair to the believers who worry that treatment and medication let us off the hook spiritually, and fair to the young woman with a diagnosis, a prescription, and an app that reminds her to breathe, who told him she'd never felt so managed and so alone at the same time. And he asks what it would take for the church to become a place where people can say the true thing out loud, and be held.
Book recommendations: "Darkness Is My Only Companion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness" by Kathryn Greene-McCreight, "Embodied Hope: A Theological Meditation on Pain and Suffering" by Kelly M. Kapic, and "The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression" by Andrew Solomon.
If you're struggling, please reach out. In Australia, Lifeline is on 13 11 14 and Beyond Blue is on 1300 22 4636, both available twenty-four hours a day. Wherever you are, please 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
Jul 14, 2026
Jul 14, 2026
1 hr 11 min
What does it take to follow Jesus today? Ten movements of radical discipleship that shape a whole life around the way of Jesus.What happens when the good life your culture is selling you, the success, the status, the winning, turns out to be the very thing that costs you your soul? A skeptical teenager in the western suburbs of Sydney picks up the four Gospels to close the door on Christianity for good, and meets a Person on a road instead. The first followers of Jesus were called people of "the Way," and forty years later, Graham is still walking it. In this episode, Graham explores the Jesus Way and ten movements that carry us out of self-interest and into radical discipleship through the lens of Scripture, theology, history, and cultural analysis. He walks through all ten: material success to spiritual riches, competition to compassion, power to servanthood, retribution to forgiveness, indifference to justice, conflict to peacemaking, legalism to grace, exclusion to embrace, expressive individualism to community, and frenetic activity to slow discipleship. He traces the Way through Scripture, from Isaiah's highway of holiness in the desert, to the early believers called followers of the hodos in Acts, to Jesus asking in Mark 8 what it profits a person to gain the world and forfeit the psyche, to the self-emptying kenosis of Philippians 2, to the call to abide, to menō, like branches on a vine in John 15. He engages with voices like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dallas Willard, Eugene Peterson, and Emmanuel Katongole, alongside the research of Robert Bellah, Charles Taylor, and Tim Kasser on individualism, the self, and what a life organized around money and image does to us. And he asks how the church recovers a Way that costs something without turning discipleship into a new performance, what these ten movements look like on an ordinary Tuesday in Sydney, and why the whole thing begins and ends with grace. Essential book: "Ten Movements of the Jesus Way" (InterVarsity Press) – https://www.amazon.com/dp/1514015641/ Book recommendations: "Ten Movements of the Jesus Way" by Graham Joseph Hill, "The Cost of Discipleship" by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and "The Divine Conspiracy" by Dallas Willard. 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
Jun 29, 2026
Jun 29, 2026
1 hr 21 min
Religion was meant to fade in the modern West, yet spiritual hunger keeps returning, and that raises big questions for the church.What happens when the story that was supposed to bury God starts to run out of road? A lifelong atheist, one of the sharpest people you'll meet, turns his coffee cup in his hands and admits he's begun to wonder whether we threw out something we needed. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, once a leading atheist, announces she's now a Christian, and Richard Dawkins calls himself a cultural Christian. And a culture that spent two centuries sure it had outgrown faith keeps finding the oldest questions surfacing again.
In this episode, Graham explores the surprising rebirth of belief, and whether secularism is actually dying, through the lens of Scripture, theology, history, and cultural analysis. He traces a long thread of Scripture engaging a sceptical world, from Paul at the Areopagus in Acts 17, to "he has set eternity in the human heart" in Ecclesiastes 3, to the Word and the light the darkness has never put out in John 1, to the God of Isaiah who makes a way in the wilderness. He engages with voices like Augustine, Blaise Pascal, C.S. Lewis, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Lesslie Newbigin, alongside the research of sociologists like Peter Berger, Grace Davie, and Rodney Stark on the breakdown of the secularisation thesis. And he asks why the confident modern prediction that we would outgrow God has run into trouble, what kind of belief is being reborn and whether a Christianity valued only for its usefulness can hold, and where the church should look for hope when the decline in the West is real and the headline data is easy to get wrong.
Book recommendations: "The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God" by Justin Brierley, "Dominion" by Tom Holland, and "A Secular Age" by Charles Taylor.
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
Jun 27, 2026
Jun 27, 2026
1 hr 9 min
Single Christians often feel invisible at church, and the Bible offers a vision where singleness is honoured and everyone has a family.What happens when the church builds its life around marriage and the family, and treats everyone else as a guest still waiting in line? A woman, faithful for eleven years, tells her pastor she still feels like a problem nobody has worked out how to solve. A widower watches the casseroles stop two weeks after the funeral. And a church that follows a single Saviour, and learned its faith from a single apostle, keeps treating singleness as a condition to be cured.
In this episode, Graham explores singleness, loneliness, and the church's obsession with marriage through the lens of Scripture, theology, history, and cultural analysis. He traces the Bible's surprisingly high view of the single life, from "it is not good for the man to be alone" in Genesis 2, to Paul calling both marriage and singleness a gift in 1 Corinthians 7, to Isaiah's promise of a name better than sons and daughters, to the God of Psalm 68 who sets the lonely in families. He engages with voices like Stanley Hauerwas, Henri Nouwen, Augustine, Aelred of Rievaulx, and Rodney Clapp, alongside the research of Vivek Murthy, Robert Putnam, and John Cacioppo on the loneliness epidemic. And he asks why a church that follows a single Lord treats marriage as the summit of a faithful life, how we can honour marriage and singleness together without making either one the measure of the other, and what it would take for the church to become the family God always meant it to be.
Book recommendations: "7 Myths About Singleness" by Sam Allberry, "Redeeming Singleness" by Barry Danylak, and "Spiritual Friendship" by Wesley 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/@GrahamJosephHillPodcastSpotify: 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 Listen Notes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast/id1890838919 Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast-6435212Boomplay: https://www.boomplaymusic.com/podcasts/143800
Jun 23, 2026
Jun 23, 2026
1 hr 12 min
Christian nationalism fuses faith with national identity, and following Jesus means giving our first loyalty to the cross over the flag.What happens when the cross gets captured by the flag? A mob storms the Capitol carrying Jesus banners. A pastor watches his congregation confuse patriotism with faith. And the church faces a question it can no longer avoid.
In this episode, Graham explores Christian nationalism and populism through the lens of Scripture, theology, history, and cultural analysis. He examines the biblical tension between the kingdom of God and the empires of this world, from 1 Samuel to the Sermon on the Mount to Revelation 7. He engages with voices like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Karl Barth, Desmond Tutu, Stanley Hauerwas, and Raimond Gaita. And he asks what Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa teach us about the dangers of fusing faith with political power, why the gospel offends both the right and the left, and what it looks like to follow Jesus without being owned by any political tribe.
Book recommendations: "The Myth of a Christian Nation" by Gregory Boyd, "Taking America Back for God" by Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry, and "Kingdom or Empire?" 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/@GrahamJosephHillPodcastSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7aqTMTcoYPcvneL4xg4OhvApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast/id1890838919Podbean: https://www.podbean.com/pw/pbblog-tsqgs-1534f12Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/271b0dd3-990d-41e6-b4ba-3fd4bcf78cefiHeartRadio: https://iheart.com/podcast/329136112Player FM: https://player.fm/series/3726148Listen Notes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast/id1890838919Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast-6435212Boomplay: https://www.boomplaymusic.com/podcasts/143800
Apr 10, 2026
Apr 10, 2026
1 hr 7 min
Artificial intelligence is changing how we work, relate, and love, and Christian faith offers a way to stay fully human in an age of AI.What does it mean to be human when machines can do so much of what we thought made us human? A child asks Alexa to pray. A widow confides in a chatbot. And the church has an answer the world urgently needs.
In this episode, Graham explores artificial intelligence through the lens of Scripture, theology, philosophy, and cultural analysis. He examines the imago Dei and why the relational interpretation matters most in an age of intelligent machines. He engages with voices like John Searle, Hubert Dreyfus, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Karl Barth, and Harry Frankfurt. And he asks what the incarnation teaches us about embodiment, what the Tower of Babel reveals about Silicon Valley's promises, and how the church can respond to AI with wisdom, justice, and confidence rooted in Christ.
Book recommendations: "2084" by John Lennox, "Made in Our Image" by Stephen Driscoll, and "Love in the Age of Algorithms" 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
Listen Notes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast/id1890838919
Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast-6435212
Boomplay: https://www.boomplaymusic.com/podcasts/143800
Apr 5, 2026
Apr 5, 2026
1 hr 9 min
Many Christians are deconstructing their faith or leaving evangelicalism altogether, and this episode asks where faith can go from here.What happens when the faith you were given as a child stops making sense? A migration is unfolding across Western Christianity, and the Christ-centered mystics saw it coming centuries ago.A word on where I stand. I hold that the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments are the inspired and infallible Word of God, written by holy people carried along by the Holy Spirit, and that they carry supreme authority in all matters of faith and conduct. I'm writing from inside historic Christian faith, shaped by the Nicene, Apostles', and Chalcedonian creeds, and centered on Jesus Christ, crucified and risen for us.
In this episode, I explore the exvangelical movement through the lens of Scripture, the Christian mystical tradition, sociology, and pastoral theology. I examine the idols that drive people from the church, including certainty, power, nationalism, purity culture, and tribalism. I engage with voices like St. John of the Cross, Simone Weil, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Charles Taylor, and Paul Ricoeur. And I ask what reconstruction looks like for those who've walked through the fire, and what the church must learn if it wants to accompany people through the wilderness with honesty, humility, and love.
Book recommendations: The Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross, Waiting for God by Simone Weil, and A Secular Age by Charles Taylor.
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
Listen Notes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast/id1890838919
Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast-6435212
Boomplay: https://www.boomplaymusic.com/podcasts/143800
Apr 5, 2026
Apr 5, 2026
1 min
A long-form Christian podcast on the Bible, theology, faith, justice, spirituality, culture, and the global church.
Graham Joseph Hill OAM PhD is an Australian theologian, the award-winning author of more than 30 books, and a recipient of the Medal of the Order of Australia for service to theological education. He researches and writes every episode himself, and each one is a solo, in-depth exploration that takes Scripture, the Christian tradition, and the hardest questions seriously. Every episode ends in hope and closes with three book recommendations for anyone who wants to go further.
The podcast alternates between two kinds of episodes. Every second episode works through a book, section, or passage of the Bible, moving through Scripture from Genesis to Revelation and looking at its world, its hardest texts, and how the church around the world reads it. The episodes in between take on the questions that matter most for Christians today. What can Majority World Christians teach the Western church? How do we follow Jesus faithfully in a post-Christian Australia? What does the Bible say about power, gender, and who gets to lead? How should we respond to AI, secularism, and shifting culture? How do faith and the care of the soul hold up through anxiety, depression, addiction, and doubt?
New episodes arrive each week, and there’s a written companion to every one on Substack so you can read along or go deeper. Follow the podcast so you don’t miss an episode. If you’ve got a question you’d like Graham to take on, email GrahamPodcast@icloud.com.
See my Substack with articles related to this podcast: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