Stan Grant is a man of remarkable intellect, profound story and deep faith.
Mads meets Stan in the midst of a difficult journey through a kind of lament, when he is deeply contemplating the three big disciplines that have steeled his extraordinary life and work - physics, philosophy and theology.
Stan says since the Voice to Parliament Referendum he’s been taking time to take stock, that he’s done too much time plucking the wings off butterflies - and that right now he’d rather write beauty into the world.
So he’s been been working on a new book that is a meditation on time, on God, on the temporal nature of our being and on the state of our modern world.
There is plenty for Stan to sit with right now. As a journalist and correspondent who covered war for 40 years, he's seen the worst of what we can do to each other but he has also seen love endure in the most Godforsaken of places. So he knows first-hand the paradoxical contradictions of what it means to be a human in a world like ours.
Stan believes it's essential we all have something bigger than ourselves to believe in for humans to flourish, because if the human being is the limit - then we will only see the limits of the human.
And in a world often consumed by the chaos of modernity, ongoing conflicts and the binaries of identity, Stan is keenly focussed these days on kindling what we share rather than what divides us for, as Franz Kafka said, identity is a cage in search of a bird.
Please make space to listen to this episode of Human Cogs as we journey with Stan Grant through his thought-provoking rivers and eddies of thought, where philosophy, theology and the mystical realm converge to offer a deeper understanding of Stan Grant the mortal, what might lie beyond this life, and how we humans can all - somehow - find our place in the untold cosmos.
Guest: Stan Grant, Award-winning Journalist, Author, Writer, Poet and Vice Chancellor's Chair of Australian-Indigenous Belonging at Charles Sturt University.
Host: Mads Hanger (Grummet)
Producer: Audio Superstar Daryl Missen
Human Cogs is available on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Podcasts or via our website where you can also catch great conversations with previous guests :)
Got some thoughts on today's episode you'd like to share?
Join in the convo on Instagram @human.cogs
We'd love you to share the love!
Please follow us or leave a quick review. It helps us get these stories out to more awesome peeps like you!
Thanks, as ever, for listening. Be well.
www.humancogs.com