A podcast that listens to what anti-vaxxers think rather than lecturing them

Work is our new religion. There are people whose primary job is writing listicles of celebrity gossip, illustrated with gifs from the Fast & Furious franchise, who refer to being a writer as a ‘calling’. If I think about this for too long my brain simply shuts down to protect itself.

What we used to do for God we now do for our work. In a secular culture, it seems totally normal — admirable, even — to sacrifice the possibility of having a family, to give up all leisure time, to starve yourself or live on insane, totally made-up diets like intermittent fasting or paleo for the sake of your job as an Instagram beauty influencer or whatever. But to wear a habit and be celibate and fast out of a religious devotion? That must be a cult!

Instead of a lecture on the idiocy of being anti-vax, they listen to their sceptical guest

The bafflement that those who serve one god (engagement numbers) feel for those who serve another god (God) is present in some parts of iHeartRadio’s new series The Turning: The Sisters Who Left. Hosted by Erika Lantz, it follows the stories of nuns who served with, and eventually left, the Missionaries of Charity, the organisation led by Mother Teresa. And while the lay person’s horror that a woman might take an oath of obedience to a patriarchal institution in the age of feminism, or the comparison of a millennia-old religion and tradition to a ‘cult’, definitely mars the series, ultimately the stories these women have to tell makes getting through all of that worth it.

Saint Teresa of Kolkata, still commonly referred to as Mother Teresa, may have been canonised by the Catholic church, but she’s still the subject of much speculation and criticism. Was her pursuit of asceticism simply masochism when directed at herself and sadism when demanded of her nuns? Or was there something godly in it? Did the poor suffer in her care or were their lives harder and more deprived outside of it?