I spent a day and a half at the Sydney Writer’s Festival last week. One part artistic, one part intellectual and one part bohemian, it’s an event largely inhabited by creative, philosophically-minded, melancholy sorts wearing lots of classy blacks, browns and charcoals, plus the odd lime-green scarf and turtleneck sweater. Between sessions you find scores of people sitting at tables, latté in hand and nose buried in some new hardback. It’s quite a sight.

It’s here that authors, playwrights, aspiring wordsmiths and plain old book lovers come to ponder the big issues of life, loss, hope, longing, politics, war and dreams. And what I found interesting was the amount of religious talk that filtered through the event. Some of the sessions had obvious religious themes: Ayaan Hirsi Ali spoke about her book Infidel and her renouncing Islam; Robert Kenny talked about Nathaniel Pepper, Australia’s most prominent Aboriginal convert to Christianity; there were typical sessions on the interplay of religion and politics too.

But matters of the spirit slipped into other conversations as well. One author spoke of her great admiration for the Aboriginal worldview, the ‘Dreaming’, calling it an all-encompassing poem of life. On another occasion an audience member spoke of the supernatural phenomena he saw while visiting Uluru. Queensland-born novelist Janet Turner Hospital talked about her experiences living in the racially-divided US state of South Carolina. She was most touched by a black newspaper columnist who told her he copes with regular death threats by praying. Even actor Richard E Grant said he felt most spiritual when he’s acting, and that one of the most profound experiences he’d ever had had been when his mother asked him for forgiveness.

Compare all this with an experience I had this week. I was sitting in a seminar that, amongst other things, was discussing the needs of abandoned children around the world. The facilitator asked us to consider what motivates people to bring a child into the world in the first place. Some answers were called out, and when one person said it can simply be our biological urge to reproduce, the facilitator said, ‘That’s right. After all, we’re only animals.’ I’ve got to say, that comment sounded so incongruous after all the talk of loss, need and care for abandoned children.

It seems to me that we’re a generation in search of a worldview. The secular naturalistic idea that humans are nothing more than animals—who arrived by some cosmic accident, and are heading into a random future—may be popular in education, the natural sciences, the media and so on, but it isn’t satisfying, and it isn’t improving the world that quickly either. All the religious talk at the Sydney Writer’s Festival at least shows that there’s something in us that wants to talk about ultimate things. Perhaps because we’re not animals, but creatures made to a divine blurprint.

I long for the day when writer’s festivals allow onto the platform those authors, thinkers and playwrights who articulate their faith in a transcendent Being. Because what the thinker’s write, teacher’s teach, students learn and culture becomes. And I for one have discovered that life, loss, hope, longing, politics, war and dreams only fall into perspective once that Creator God is part of the equation.

© 2007 Sheridan Voysey is a writer, speaker, broadcaster and author of Unseen Footprints: Encountering the divine along the journey of life (Scripture Union, 2005). www.thethoughtfactory.net