Soul Search

Across the Middle East, desert caves and ancient monasteries hid troves of ancient manuscripts. Now, advances in machine learning are helping scholars to unlock these ancient texts and the lost religious worlds that produced them.

Saint Hildegard of Bingen is perhaps Medieval Europe's most remarkable woman. She was a prolific writer, a theologian, a mystic, and Europe's first known female composer. It been about 1000 years since she lived, but why is the music she wrote so popular today?
Guests: 
Jennifer Bain is a professor from Dalhousie University in Canada. Jennifer edited the Cambridge Companion to Hildegard of Bingen, and she's also the author of several works on Hildegard's music and its reception.
Sylvia MacRitchie-Hook did postgraduate research about Hildegard as a Ramsay Scholar at the Australian Catholic University. Her thesis is Art as Revelation: A Theological Aesthetic Reading of Hildegard of Bingen's Scivias.
More info: 
The isolation and imagination of the first female English author (Soul Search)
Hilda-thon! Eight hours of music by Hildegard von Bingen (ABC Classic)

Stories about gardening run deep in many cultures – from the garden of the gods in the epic of Gilgamesh, to the garden of Eden in the biblical book of Genesis. Gardening is also a practice that, for some people, connects the body, soil and soul. On Soul Search Costa Georgiadis shares about the life lessons he's learnt from gardening. 
Guest: 
Costa Georgiadis, presenter of Gardening Australia and the author of Costa’s World: Gardening for the soil, the soul and the suburbs.
More info: 
How gardening is a conversation (ABC Listen)
The science and spirituality of soil (ABC Listen)
Costa Georgiadis visits remote NT communities to teach kids about gardening and healthy foods (ABC News)

In today's fast-paced, tech-saturated society, is it possible to live a life of fulfilment? Until his recent death, the writer, farmer and sustainability activist Wendell Berry believed that life's meaning came from cultivating the land and building meaningful relationships with one another.

In a world that prizes self-interest, is compassion a weakness? In 1992 the Dalai Lama asked a psychologist, instead of focusing only on negative emotions, why don't we study happiness and compassion? Now, the psychology of compassion has become an established field, and a place for rich conversation between science and religion.