There’s every chance that 2019 might just be a great year for evangelism in Australia. Every chance a wave is coming in. Every chance indeed. There are some telling signs. I was listening last week to the always excellent This Cultural Moment podcast, and Mark Sayers was observing that while it seems that the tide has […]
Saw the new Spiderman movie last night. Loved it. What a way to freshen up what was threatening to become a stale franchise. Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse sloughs off the tired old exoskeleton and wriggles free to create new webs of intrigue. Its use of animation, mashed up with some real life footage, and a montage […]
Well, it’s that time of year. The winding up time of the year for lists etc. Strava kilometres runs, books read (or claimed to have been read), calories burned, Facebook activities liked, angry emojis given in lieu of actual passive aggressive comments, stuff like that. So here are the top five articles read on stephenmcalpine.com […]
The late political cartoonist Bill Leak observed that his job was becoming more difficult each year because the parodies he once drew were becoming realities. When cultural and political life is a joke, where do you go from there? Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the parody of life that has become actual life: the […]
Hey teacher in Christian school, if you want to continue your long and well documented tradition of discriminating against gay students in your school (deriding them, expelling them, pointing them out in the classroom, the sort of thing they’ve been doing up to this point with impunity), then you’d better get a wriggle on. For […]
It’s a hard truth, but it’s been the painful things in ministry that have shaped me most. I wish it were not that way, but it is. I wish the conferences and books and teaching series had been the biggest teachers. They’re all great things, and I appreciate them. But I suspect many are nodding […]
The reason that we are at such an impasse in Australia over religious freedom/ discrimination is simple: It’s a tale of two gospels. Competing views about good news. And as such, with so much at stake, there can be no backdown and no middle ground. Not that I would not like there to be middle […]
This is Ollie. Ollie is one of my “No Men”. Ollie has been one of my longest term friends. A man of Christian character over a long period of time. I took this photo of him in 1999 overlooking the Dorset coastline near Ollie’s family’s holiday cottage. Ollie and his wife, Phil, had just gotten […]
It’s time to get real. The debate around religious freedom in Australia is an arm wrestle and we’re at an impasse. Each side is straining at the other, and refusing to budge. And the reason each side is refusing to budge is that there is so much at stake. Paul Kelly nailed it […]
A friend sat watching the Australian Senate debating the contentious anti-discrimination bill before our Parliament today. It’s been the most rushed piece of legislation that is completely at odds with the gravity of the consequences of its enactment. The furphy around the legislation as it pertained to schools, was that it was presented as a […]
