It felt like we dodged a bullet. The unexpected electoral result of a few weeks back cleared my calendar. As a board member of a Christian school I was assuming an ALP government wold come to power, a party which had vowed to cut all religious exemptions for Christian schools. And that would mean a […]
So Moses was a murderer, right? He failed to do what God wanted him to do and did things his own way. But eventually he got back on track and God used him despite his failures. Just like God can use you, despite your failures. That theme has launched a thousand sermons, and a thousand […]
The thing about zombies is that you can never turn your back on them. Ever. You’ve watched enough zombie series by now on livestream TV to know this. There’s never a point where the zombies go: “Well you’ve bumped off enough of us, and we’ve not even put a scratch on you, how about we […]
The secular always pitches itself, as Charles Taylor reminds us, as a subtraction story; a narrative about what life looks like when all of the detritus of religious myth and legend is stripped away. Once the transcendent is banished to its rightful place in the museum of ideas (or the prison house of failed and […]
This is the 21st century. You don’t need to justify yourself to anyone for anything. The new Mercedes B-Class advertising campaign caught my eye – and my ear – in the cinema the other day. So much so that I grabbed my phone and made a note of the slogan above. The 21st century. Justify […]
You’d think that with ALP politicians now falling over themselves to show how in tune they actually are with religious communities that this would be a time for the progressives to start listening to people they don’t understand. Yet progressive online journals such as The Conversation, are still getting it completely wrong, to the point […]
This is a great story. Billionaire tech investor, Robert F Smith, took the opportunity as commencement speaker at Moorehouse College in the US, to calmly wipe the student debt of every student he was addressing. All 400 students. All $58 million of their debt. Just like that. As a black leader in the US, addressing […]
It’s interesting, and slightly disturbing, watching the glee towards the vanquished following the election, and its shock result, last night. Schadenfreude – the German word to describe glee at others misfortune – abounds at moments such as this. For Bill Shorten it’s the end of a political career. For Scott Morrison it’s the making of one. […]
I was speaking to a well regarded UK apologist, pastor and author by Skype from Scotland the other day and he said this: It’s never been more hostile to the gospel, but never more open either. What he meant was that while there is a concerted push against the Christian frame among the political, cultural […]
I made a comment to a non-Christian friend who sends their child to a faith-based school that employs practicing Christian teachers, that their decision to vote YES in the same sex plebiscite might mean they would soon be looking somewhere else to school their child. They seemed surprised. I didn’t say it with any particular […]
Sooner or later reality catches up with the intellectual schizophrenia of gender identity politics and beats it to the line. And sometimes, as in the case of a dispute over prize money for a recent running race at Queensland University of Technology, actually beats it to the line. As the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports, the […]
It’s a terrible way for it to happen, but with the awful scenes in Colombo overnight, Christian persecution just got its moment in the sun for 2019. And the manner in which it is being reported for what it is – a terrorist attack aimed predominantly, though not exclusively, at Christians -, makes it pretty […]
I was struck today reading the Luke account of Jesus’ trial and death. A key feature of that dreadful day was mockery. Yes there was torture, betrayal and crucifixion. And they are terrible, terrible things. And in that context mockery may seem a minor thing. But not to the Gospel writer: The men who were […]
On a small number of occasions my very good French friend, Daniel Szabo, – who is that rare breed; an evangelical Christian in France, – has written a blog post for me. I asked him to write this one after he told me yesterday that, although he lived in Paris many years, he almost never […]
Paris, and the world, lost something more than a wonderful piece of ecclesiastical history and architecture overnight. It lost yet another link with a transcendent past, that was once so usefully beautiful. French writer Guy de Maupassant, and decidedly 20th century singer-poet Elvis Costello, label, both have written works called Useless Beauty, or as in Costello’s case, […]
If my male, pale and stale heart could be warmed, it would be so by the growing realisation that the baton of colonialism, long the historic burden of the conservative, Christianised West, can now been handed to the woke Left in our culture. The evidence is coming in in spades. The progressive narrative has created, […]
There was a picture of Israel Folau and his wife having coffee on the streets of Sydney yesterday with a group of people. But don’t worry. Those people were representatives of the Australian Rugby Union having a stern word with him, so no one was actually putting their cultural credibility on the line by being […]
There was outrage amongst members of Australia’s lying community this morning after rugby star Israel Folau’s latest social media gaffe on Instagram. Speaking under a pseudonym, spokesman for support group, Lying Is A Right, Chuck Norris, said that enough was enough and that Folau had to be called to account. “It’s getting out of hand,” […]
Well, this could well be transgender activism’s “Spotlight” moment. You may remember Spotlight, that fantastic Hollywood movie named after the journalistic investigation team at the Boston Globe newspaper. Through methodical research, the Spotlight team at the Globe uncovered the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church in the United States in the early 2000s, pushing […]
Trendcendence: [trend-sen-duh ns] Noun: The quality or state of trending that ushers in a sense of transcendence. Okay, so I made that word up – it’s a neo-logism – but bear with me. We live, publicly at least, in an avowedly secular world. Living in a material world and we are material girls, boys, or a […]
I was interviewed for a secular podcast, Human Potential, but a great bloke from Sydney, Oliver Freer. I was in Sydney for a day or so a few weeks back so we caught up and he asked a bunch of great questions, including about what it means to be a man well into the second […]
I wrote last week, in light of the Christchurch massacre in New Zealand, that the decision by the government to broadcast the Islamic call to prayer as part of its memorial was a display of secularism’s hegemony, rather than a kow-towing to Islam. And I wrote that in light of a lot of huffing and […]
