Kira Austin-Young - Compassion and Complexity: Faith and Reproductive Freedom (N349)
Nomad Podcast
Tim Nash
4.7 • 658 Ratings
🗓️ 25 July 2025
⏱️ 88 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode, Tim speaks with Episcopal priest and author Kira Austin-Young, about the moral, theological, and pastoral dimensions of abortion. Together, they reflect on the silence in progressive churches, the complexity of personhood, biblical texts often used in the debate, and how Christians might begin to hold space for compassion and moral complexity in conversations around reproductive freedom.
It’s a thoughtful, grounded, and emotionally honest conversation that resists easy answers.
After the interview, Nomad hosts Tim and Joy reflect on how silence and inherited assumptions shaped their early views on abortion. They explore how personal experience, grief, and discernment invite a more compassionate and complex conversation—and ask what it means for faith to hold space for all of that.
Interview starts at 16m 40s
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The |
| 0:07.0 | The Welcome back to Nomad podcast. I'm Tim Nash, and this is quite literally Joy Brooks. |
| 0:41.8 | Hello. |
| 0:42.8 | How's garden life, Joy? |
| 0:44.8 | Currently it's just rained, so I'm hopeful I might get to see all my little slug and snail friends. |
| 0:50.5 | I was going to ask you about your snail friends. I haven't seen any snails in my neighbourhood for ages. |
| 0:54.0 | Lots of slugs around. There's lots of slugs merrily attacking the new hedge |
| 0:57.9 | that I planted, but I've not seen a snail for ages. Yeah, no, obviously my garden is so |
| 1:03.2 | snail friendly that I will see them pretty regularly, but when it rains I'll get a whole |
| 1:09.2 | horde of them, that's that's fun. |
| 1:11.3 | How do you make a garden snail friendly? |
| 1:13.1 | They're like special plants that they like. |
| 1:15.0 | I think probably it involves not having a very tidy garden and lots of mulchy sort of stuff that other people might clear up. |
| 1:26.4 | So that and I will tend to in the sort of patches that are just what I like to call rewilded, |
| 1:32.8 | but that might be a bit fancy for what really exists. |
| 1:35.5 | I'll often just throw out kind of old bits of lettuce and carrot and all of that, |
| 1:39.7 | and it just lands in the middle of that and they have a great time. |
| 1:42.6 | So, yeah, I think for me, it involves |
| 1:45.6 | just being me, but for other people it might involve quite a lot of effort of not clearing |
| 1:50.6 | away stuff that snails like. I wonder if the same could be true for inside our houses, by not |
| 1:55.7 | clearing up, it's somehow better. Well, I like to hope so, because it means my house is better. |
| 2:00.4 | Yeah, I think as hope so because it means my house is better. |
... |
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