My conversation with... Jennifer Wiseman

Re-enchanting podcast guest Jennifer Wiseman shared an infectious wonder at the universe. Podcast co-host Belle Tindall reflects on their conversation.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

Four stars scintilate above a spiral galaxy viewed from the side.

Hubble Space Telescope captures a side-on view of NGC 3568, a barred spiral galaxy roughly 57 million light-years from the Milky Way.

European Space Agency, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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The details of astronomy, the workings of astrophysics, the enormity of space, the fact that the universe is still expanding by the moment, the mystery of what lies beyond what we can see and even predict – those are things that do not sit comfortably in the confines of my brain.

It’s as if my brain is allergic to the sheer enormity of the subject. My mind does deep, it does not take lightly to vast.

And that is precisely why I so thoroughly enjoyed my conversation with astronomer, author and speaker, Dr Jennifer Wiseman for the Re-Enchanting podcast. Jennifer is Director Emeritus of the programme of Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is also a senior astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre. Science is a means by which Jennifer is able to live a wonderfully curious life, marvelling at the natural world and what lies beyond it.

When the narrative of science and religion being ultimately and inevitably at war with each other is the narrative that gets (by far) the most amplification, it was really interesting to hear how they coincide so powerfully for Jennifer. When talking with her, it becomes clear that they co-exist, they are the symbiotic forces that fuel her wonder at the universe. A wonder that is undeniably infectious. As she pointed out, the very fact that we have a curiosity about the universe we find ourselves in is, in itself, something to marvel at.

‘We are here, we’ve come through this 13.8 billion year development of the universe to the point where we can have this self-contemplating life that recognises a bit of where we’ve come from and how we connect to the universe.’

These are surely the thoughts that existential crises are made of.

Speaking with Jennifer made me feel small. Small in time, and small in place. I suppose dwelling on the enormity of an ever-expanding universe will do that to a person. Afterall, there are around one hundred billion stars in our galaxy (that we know of), the closest of which is four lightyears away. The vast majority of these stars have their own solar systems, hosting their own planets that orbit around them. And that’s still only within the confines of our own cosmic neighbourhood; there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in our (observable) universe, and infinite mystery that sits far beyond these numbers.

Since our conversation, I’ve been left with this simple, but salient thought – we’re incredibly small. But further to that, I’ve been pondering the notion that there’s a good kind of small, and perhaps we are it. We may be just one of the eight-billion inhabitants of a ‘pale blue dot’ in a universe that stretches far beyond the capacities of human understanding and measurement, but there’s a profound beauty in that. It does not equate to a feeling of non-consequentialism or oblivion, on the contrary, it is deeply empowering. It is, after all, the powerful reality upon which much of the twelve steps of recovery offered by AA/NA is built. There is a mysterious, and yet obviously tangible, power in coming face-to-face with our own small-ness, and surrendering to that which is deeper, higher, bigger than us.

Learning a little about Jennifer’s childhood living among the Ozark Mountains, with evenings spent gazing up at a canopy of stars that stretched from ‘horizon to horizon’, it was enchanting to hear about how her career has been an out-living of a childhood appreciation for the things that are so much bigger than us mere humans.

If you have a pull towards all things astronomy, this episode is undoubtedly for you. If you’ve ever pondered what science and faith look like when they’re not entering the ring from different corners, readying themselves for a show-down, this episode is also for you. If you’re craving enchantment of the most cosmic kind, this episode is for you too.

This conversation with Dr Jennifer Wiseman will be a refreshing antidote to the disillusion that comes with assuming we are the centre of our universe.

Listen to the Re-enchanting episode now.

Article

Culture

Digital

Freedom of Belief

24 April 2025

4 min read

Failure to report Nigeria’s massacres reflects a wider media evolution

The new reporters and the struggle to tell the truth.

Chris Wadibia

Chris Wadibia is an academic advising on faith-based challenges. His research includes political Pentecostalism, global Christianity, and development.

A man reads a newspaper called The Punch.

Muhammad-Taha Ibrahim on Unsplash.

The large-scale slaughter of any religious group deserves robust, stubborn media coverage. Merciless persecution of Christians in Nigeria is the most overlooked and yet most newsworthy story in the country’s media landscape. This violence requires immediate and significantly expanded attention from local media. So why is it not making headlines?

Nigeria, a charmingly vibrant and dynamic capital of the Christian world with nearly 100 million believers, is paradoxically the deadliest country in the world to be a Christian. NGO Open Doors estimates that 12 Nigerian Christians die every day because of their faith – one every two hours. Between October 2022 and September 2023, 4,118 people died in Nigeria simply for identifying as a Christian. These numbers seem more appropriate to the medieval world. The sad reality, however, is that gory, gruesome, and family-destroying violence against Christians is indeed occurring throughout contemporary Nigeria.

Some new media voices, like Truth Nigeria courageously report on these sinister, lethal attacks. It’s a Nigeria-focussed media entity backed by Equipping the Persecuted, a US-based humanitarian non-profit organisation, devoted to exposing avoidable losses of life in Nigeria. A disproportionate number of these nightmarish attacks deliberately target vulnerable Christians living in communities easily accessible to any of Nigeria's many Islamist terrorist sects. New media like Truth Nigeria are filling the coverage gaps created by legacy media inaction. Why are its peers in legacy media not reporting on them too?

Who are the most trusted voices in the contemporary world? For perhaps the first time in modern history, legacy media no longer have seniority in the coliseum of global thought. Popular disenchantment with it is growing globally. Billions of people worldwide no longer perceive traditional legacy media as a trustworthy and legitimate arbiter of information.

Few Nigeria-focused media voices (legacy or new) calculate it as in their interests to speak out against the abuses.

A key reason for the growing disenchantment is the increasingly obvious and frustrating political capture of legacy media voices. Channels and publications were once trusted for their popularly perceived independence, objectivity, and nonpartisanship. Now those politically unbiased legacy media have become an endangered species nearing extinction.

Such media evolution is especially pronounced in the US. An American media landscape once led by legacy media channels like CNN, ABC News, and Fox News now includes new-kid-on-the-block podcasters like Joe Rogan, Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens, whose shows attract millions of views and subscribers. Independent, personality-driven new media voices like these regularly outperform their legacy media counterparts, the latter of which are being increasingly deemed by critics as too establishmentarian, out of touch, and unappealing to younger viewers.

In Nigeria, like in the US, popular public perception apprehends the relationship between media and the state to be too close for the media to operate autonomously and impartially. A relevant factor is the federal and state governments hold the lion’s share of power. They are able to shut down or severely damage the operational capacity of the media that does highlight the kleptocratic industrial complex reinforcing infamous world-leading levels of inequality. Few Nigeria-focused media voices (legacy or new) calculate it as in their interests to speak out against the abuses so entrenched in the social and historical fabrics of Nigerian society. Mass and violent persecution of Christians is perhaps the most significant of these abuses.

Like many other countries, Nigeria has no shortage of newsworthy stories marked by great abuse and violence. However, the fact that the ongoing slaughter of Christians is taking place in one of the global capitals of Christianity, the religion most responsible for building the modern world, suggests the refusal of legacy media there to report on local massacres is driven by political factors. Ones that differentiate it from the dramatic changes in the media industry we are witnessing in countries like the US.

Many influential media personalities in Nigeria went to Christian schools and universities, and worship in Christian churches. However, they refuse to use their positions of power to draw attention to fellow members of their global community of Christians who are violently killed every single day in the same sovereign land on which they sleep at night.

What’s driving the reticence?

One of the distinctive factors contributing to Nigerian legacy media reticence to cover such killings is that Nigeria is the only country in the world that is home to both world-leading numbers of Christians and Muslims. The country has the world’s sixth largest number of Christians and the world's fifth largest number of Muslims.

Reports on killings of Christians, especially given that many Muslims also die from radical Islamist violence in Nigeria, could be perceived by viewers as religious bias fanning flames of sectarianism in a country already notorious for such violence. A second factor is that legacy media coverage of these slaughters implicates the disappointing response of Nigerian state agencies charged with maintaining security. Proud state personalities would likely react to negative media coverage of their performance by becoming even less engaged with the media.

Either way, the Nigerian government has built for itself an infamous global reputation for being dysfunctional when trying to serve its citizens. And in contrast, only achieving a semblance of normal function when serving the interests of its kleptocrats and oligarchs. Vulnerable Christians living in regions affected by religiously motivated violence who live to see another day (unlike their less fortunate friends and family members) bear the brunt of a disinterested government and the politically captured media that fails to report it.