EP #68 Guiding a Church in a Time of Crisis - with Bishop Guli Francis-Dehqani

Join the Leaving Egypt community on Substack: leavingegyptpodcast.substack.com In this episode, Al Roxburgh and Jenny Sinclair talk with Tracey Rowland about the unravelling of modernity and the response of the Church. Tracey explains how, over the last six centuries, faith and reason became separated, resulting in a false anthropology and the current crisis of identity. She unpacks the fracture that opened after Vatican II between the Concilio instinct that sought to correlate the faith with modernity, and the Communio current which insisted that faith and reason, nature and grace, truth and beauty belong together. This conversation underlines the vital importance of Christian intellectual engagement with our era. Tracey calls for an integrated, confident Christianity grounded in place and friendship, mediated by the sacraments. As she points out, Christian faith is not just another moral code. It is the very font of beauty and truth that forms a people and gives a culture meaning. Tracey Rowland holds the St John Paul II Chair of Theology at the University of Notre Dame Australia. Professor Rowland studied law at the University of Queensland and philosophy at the University of Melbourne before earning a PhD from the University of Cambridge on theological understandings of culture, drawing on Alasdair MacIntyre, Henri de Lubac, and Joseph Ratzinger. She also holds pontifical degrees from the Lateran University in Rome. From 2001 to 2017, she served as the inaugural Dean of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in Melbourne. She was appointed to Pope Francis’s International Theological Commission in 2014 and to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences in 2023. In 2020, she became the first Australian and only the third woman to receive the Ratzinger Prize for Theology. She is widely published and has authored influential books on Pope Benedict XVI, Catholic theology, and Christian humanism. LINKS For Tracey Rowland: https://www.notredame.edu.au/about-us/faculties-and-schools/school-of-philosophy-and-theology/fremantle/staff/tracey-rowland https://www.pass.va/en/academicians/ordinary/rowland.html Books: Catholic Social Theology Unwhigged: Essays in Legal and Political Philosophy and Theology (Bloomsbury, 2027) Introducing Communio Theology (Word on Fire Academic, 2025) Unconformed to the Age: Essays in Catholic Ecclesiology (Steubenville: Emmaus Academic, 2024) Beyond Kant and Nietzsche: The Munich Defence of Christian Humanism (London: Bloomsbury, 2021) Catholic Theology (London: Bloomsbury, 2017) Benedict XVI: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Bloomsbury, 2010) Culture and the Thomist Tradition: after Vatican II (London: Routledge, 2003) The Anglican Patrimony in Catholic Communion Tracey Rowland (ed) (London: Bloomsbury, 2021) For Alan J Roxburgh: http://alanroxburgh.com/about Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alan.roxburgh.127/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thecommonsnetwork Books: Forming Communities of Hope in the Great Unravelling: Leadership in a Changing World (with Roy Searle) Joining God in the Great Unravelling Leadership, God’s Agency and Disruptions Joining God, Remaking Church, Changing the World: The New Shape of the Church in Our Time For Jenny Sinclair: Substack: https://t4cg.substack.com/s/from-jenny-sinclair Website: https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/from-jenny-sinclair LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenny-sinclair-0589783b/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/T4CG Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TogetherForTheCommonGoodUK Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/t4cg_insta/

In this episode, Al Roxburgh and Jenny Sinclair meet Matthew Sanders. Amid conflicting claims about AI, Matthew brings a leading tech practitioner’s experience and rare ethical seriousness. He speaks of what he calls the coming “existential cliff” — the disruption AI and robotics will bring to work, identity and meaning — in societies weakened by Western individualism. Though optimistic, he warns the transition will be messy. The classical, GDP-shaped model of work is ending; what replaces it will appear as we find new forms of work and vocation, and discern what must remain human. For Matthew, the AI revolution is not only economic and technological; it is an anthropological event. His hope rests less in technology than in the Church recovering its vocation as a place of human, intellectual and spiritual formation. Drawing on Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas, Matthew locates resolution not in Silicon Valley but in small communities gathered around church life. Just as the monasteries emerged from the collapse of the Roman Empire, Matthew believes the parish is called to become “the ark for a post-work world.” Matthew Harvey Sanders is Founder and CEO of Longbeard, the leading mission-driven technology company building faithful, Catholic-oriented artificial intelligence. The Longbeard team has developed some of the most significant Catholic AI initiatives in the world, including Magisterium AI, a powerful large language model trained exclusively on official Church documents and ancient Christian manuscripts; Vulgate AI, a dedicated tool for biblical access and study; and Ephrem, the world’s first fully dedicated Catholic AI. Sanders is committed to creating technology that fosters human solidarity, serves the Church, and challenges the dominant technocratic paradigms of our age. He is also the founder of the Builders AI Forum and has served as a digital strategist for numerous Catholic nonprofits, creating ethical tech platforms for evangelisation and environmental education. Matthew is Canadian, and now lives in Rome. LINKS For Matthew Sanders: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-harvey-sanders/ https://www.magisterium.com https://www.longbeard.com/blog/the-reality-of-ai-and-the-crisis-of-meaning https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/AI-and-the-Future-of-Work-T4CG-report-June-2026.pdf Magnifica Humanitas For Alan J Roxburgh: http://alanroxburgh.com/about Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alan.roxburgh.127/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thecommonsnetwork Books: Forming Communities of Hope in the Great Unravelling: Leadership in a Changing World (with Roy Searle) Joining God in the Great Unravelling Leadership, God’s Agency and Disruptions Joining God, Remaking Church, Changing the World: The New Shape of the Church in Our Time For Jenny Sinclair: Substack: https://t4cg.substack.com/s/from-jenny-sinclair Website: https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/from-jenny-sinclair LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenny-sinclair-0589783b/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/T4CG Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TogetherForTheCommonGoodUK Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/t4cg_insta/

Join the Leaving Egypt community on Substack: leavingegyptpodcast.substack.com In this episode, Al Roxburgh and Jenny Sinclair meet Karen Wilk, who has devoted her life to discovering what it means to join with God in the neighbourhood. Like many other pastors, Karen began in youth ministry. Over time, though, she grew uneasy watching so much church-life energy go into getting people through the door, rather than helping them develop a real relationship with Jesus. Long before it was fashionable, she recognised there was something upside-down about this and wondered what it would look like to form church in her neighbourhood - with her neighbours. Shaped by influences like John McKnight’s Abundant Community, Karen has quietly and persistently pioneered a deeply loving commitment to place and people. In a moment when many are awakening to the realisation that Christ’s church is meant to be rooted in the local, Karen’s story is a testament to what patient, pioneering faithfulness can create in a neighbourhood - something beautiful for God. Dr. Karen Wilk is a community pastor and neighbourhood animator who is part of a growing network of Canadian faith communities. For almost 20 years, Karen has been pursuing a ‘new thing’ — seeking to discover and join God at work in her neighbourhood, and equipping and inspiring others to do the same (through Resonate Global Mission and Forge Canada). She has a Doctorate in Missional Leadership from Northern Seminary (Chicago) and lives in Edmonton, Canada. She has been a pastor/teacher for about 40 years. She’s also a spouse, mum, nana, e-biker, birder, pickleballer, outdoorsy and crafty type. LINKS For Karen Wilk: https://forgecanada.ca/ www.resonateglobalmission.org/ Mentioned in this episode: John McKnight and Peter Block The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods Barbara Brown Taylor An Altar in the World: Finding the Sacred Beneath Our Feet Books: Don’t Invite Them to Church: Moving from a Come and See to a Go and Be Church For Alan J Roxburgh: http://alanroxburgh.com/about Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alan.roxburgh.127/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thecommonsnetwork Books: Forming Communities of Hope in the Great Unravelling: Leadership in a Changing World (with Roy Searle) Joining God in the Great Unravelling Leadership, God’s Agency and Disruptions Joining God, Remaking Church, Changing the World: The New Shape of the Church in Our Time For Jenny Sinclair: Substack: https://t4cg.substack.com/s/from-jenny-sinclair Website: https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/from-jenny-sinclair LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenny-sinclair-0589783b/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/T4CG Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TogetherForTheCommonGoodUK Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/t4cg_insta/

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Al Roxburgh and Jenny Sinclair welcome Maurice Glasman back to Leaving Egypt for a second conversation. Maurice traces the exhaustion of a settlement built on progressivism and globalisation -one the church has too often been co-opted into rather than resisted. In its eroding, he sees opportunity for a politics built not on elite abstraction but on ordinary virtues - commitment, constraint, solidarity, family, place and nation - drawn from the well of Catholic Social Teaching. Water, land, the human person: for Maurice these are gifts of God, not commodities, and recovering that conviction is where renewal begins. He argues the divide is no longer left versus right but sovereignists versus globalists, those who want power to rest with peoples and places, versus those who would transfer it to borderless, unaccountable systems of capital, ideology and technology. He turns to two countries close to his heart: confronting Iran’s regime and backing its people’s resistance, and Ukraine’s costly defence of its sovereignty. What may be coming, he senses in a yearning for settled life from working-class Britain to Ukraine and the Iranian people, is restoration: the recovery of family, faith, place and nation: a hopeful story the church could yet join, if only it had eyes to see it. Lord Maurice Glasman is a British politician, political theorist, commentator and community organiser who has served as a Labour life peer in the UK Parliament since 2011. He is best known as the founder of Blue Labour, a movement launched in 2009 to address Labour’s drift from its founding roots, challenging both New Labour’s neoliberalism and progressive identity politics. Drawing on Catholic Social Teaching, Aristotle and the thought of Karl Polanyi, he promotes a politics of the common good. Alongside his parliamentary work he remains active internationally, particularly in relation to Ukraine and Iran. He has a longstanding commitment to community organising, most recently in Grimsby, through the Common Good Foundation, which he founded and directs. Born into a Jewish working-class family in North London, he studied at Cambridge, York and Florence. His official title is Baron Glasman of Stoke Newington and of Stamford Hill.