We’ve all heard over the past few years of the move among Nones to start something like church, with all the bells and whistles, talks and coffee, singing and platforms. Something like church but with one small variable – no Jesus. They began to meet in buildings across all the funky cities in the world […]
Phew!! Many an evangelical just let out a huge sigh of relief following yesterday’s definitive exposé of just how right-of-centre Israel Folau’s church group is. Izzy’s just been outed as totally non-kosher in the orthodox Christian world, so we can all get on with ignoring him. Many evangelicals have, no doubt, been praising Jesus (and the […]
Vinyl is back. Back in black. My daughter’s friends bought her a record player last year for her 17th birthday. Why? Because in case you hadn’t heard, vinyl is back. Those big black discs of polyvinyl chloride with one long continuous groove are selling like, er, hit records. Vinyl is back. In a way that […]
Tim Costello is dead right. We’re not being persecuted like Christians around the world and we need to suck it up. I’ve said that for a while now. We’re not getting the level of sheer violence and terror that Christians experience around the globe on a daily basis. But Tim Costello is dead wrong […]
If only If only If only If only there were someone other than Izzy. Someone not like Izzy who was getting hounded out of his future employment for making a statement about his religious convictions. If only there were some no-name who wasn’t followed in Instagram by thousands, and who wasn’t on social media all […]
The Church tried to conform itself to the world at a moment when the world was becoming uglier. That sentence alone makes the conversation in Catholic journal First Things, between French author and atheist enfant terrible Michel Houellebecq, and Catholic conservative journalist Geoffrey Lejeune, worth the read. It sums up the failed strategy of a […]
I was doing a recovery run the other day, just cruising along the river the morning after a hard effort long run the day before. Stunning Perth winter’s afternoon, not a breeze, not a cloud, nice and cool. Recovery runs are not the time to check your Garmin for pace, in fact you’d be better […]
Just a few posts I’ve written for City Bible Forum recently. I’ve just started working three days per week for City Bible Forum in a new venture called Third Space (so watch this “third” space!). I’ve got the impressive title National Communicator, which just means “keep doing what you’re doing”! I will continue to work […]
So here’s a video from a Scottish public school of a student in a dispute with his teacher which results in him being put out of class for thirty minutes. Oh here we go again, students being rowdy and misbehaving! What’s his crime? Have a watch: pic.twitter.com/Nz0Attx2js — I,Hypocrite (@lporiginalg) June 14, 2019 Go you […]
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 […]
It’s almost bizarre that one of the levers being pulled in the last week of the Federal election campaign is whether the Australian Prime Minister can unequivocally state that gay people are or are not going to hell. Yet that’s the squirmy question that the Opposition Leader Bill Shorten presented, unprompted, in a media stop […]
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 […]
Forget the furore over the “Easter worshippers versus Christian” Tweets by the former US President Barak Obama, and the former (soon to be again?) Presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, about the Sri Lankan bombings. It’s the lack of any social media comment by the up and coming star of the Democrats in the US that is […]
