Month: December 2016

2016 has proven yet again that when it comes to wooing and winning the hearts of the public  with a good story, conservatives are completely outclassed by progressives. And Christian conservatives?  Don’t get me started!  You would think that with the best narrative in the world at their fingertips, full of highs, lows, dramas, intrigue, […]

Tomorrow I am going to drive in to my father’s aged care facility and discuss palliative care options with the staff.  I knew this day would come, perhaps thought it would come more quickly, but it has finally arrived as 2016 itself ends.  I fully expected Dad to be dead by the middle of the […]

Bowie, Prince, Ali, Cohen, Michael, and now Fisher – it’s been a deathly year for icons of pop culture, and we’ve still go three days to go. Who’d be a celebrity these days, or at least who’d do it without getting danger money? The number of celebrities shuffling off – or falling off – in […]

It’s not just the last week of living in our house after 17 years, it’s also the last week of working with the bloke who helped plant Providence Church Midland with me. He’s a young man who has been crucial to the whole venture. In fact without him I am pretty sure we would not […]

Well I’ve got my summer reading list on the boil for January (I have the whole month off!), and it contains two running books. The first is Phil Knight’s Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike.  Really looking forward to this one, given Nike is my favourite shoe this year. That may change next year […]

I have prayed so often for a Damascus Road experience for the post-evangelical cohort in the church in Australia, but never did I expect a conversion so quickly. Today, after the Australian Christian Lobby’s headquarters in Canberra was severely damaged in a vehicle explosion, planned and carried out deliberately by the driver of the vehicle, the same […]

This would have to be one of the most confronting photos of the year. It also epitomises the reason for Christmas. Sure there have been dozens – thousands – of bloodied survivors and non-survivors photographed around the world.  Victims who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Photographers who happened to […]

As anyone who reads this blog will know I love a bit of culture, being the cultural sophisticate that I am’n’all.  And of course I love a good culture vulture; the person or institute that is slightly ahead of the curve, able to not only pick the zeitgeist, but to explain why such a geist […]

Remember the days when “Zie Hir” was the way Germans said “See here!” in English-language war movies? Well those words are still being used in a war, but this time it’s a conflagration that will run far longer than anything Europe threw up in 1939.  It’s the battle of language and meaning, that’s been hotting up […]

What do we do when Babylon withdraws to lick its wounds? For that is indeed what we are experiencing – a temporary halt of the post-Christian/anti-Christian framework within the Western setting, as populist politics in 2016 sweeps the progressive agenda aside. This recent backlash has been met with a certain glee among Christians who believed, often […]