One of the pinnacles of the Bible is the Sermon on the Mount. Edward 'Weary' Dunlop, was an Australian who became famous for his leadership of prisoners of war on the Thai-Burma railroad. Jesus' Sermon on the the Mount affected him profoundly. He read it in...
I have decided to coin a phrase, the 'tyranny of the irrelevant'. This refers to clutter, junk and tasks which fill our days but add nothing to them. I remember my grandmother's laundry: there was a copper - nothing like today's hot tubs - under which...
A deep problem with the west today is that we appear to have lost our capacity to love others. We love things more than we love people. We love our own ideas more than we love people. We love our money, possessions and fame more...
What does the Bible teach about violence? Some critics make the case for a moral equivalency between Christianity and Islam, claiming that the Bible is no less violent than the Qur’an.1 Certainly the conquest of Canaan, as described in the Bible, was a bloody one....
The other day, listening to the local radio station, I heard the two hosts chatting about religion: "Of course every religion teaches 'turn the other check.'" What a complement to Jesus Christ, that his distinctive and famous instructions on how to respond to violence (see Matthew...
When I was a kid I lived for a time in Western Queensland. The country was then in the grip of a terrible drought, when all the sheep had to eat was the leaves of the mulga trees. After a long period of dry, dry...
This article originally appeared in The Australian. The world has witnessed a flood of reaction this week to Benedict XVI's Regensburg lecture, a reaction that has gone well beyond words, with attacks on churches in Gaza, the West Bank and Basra, and apparently the killing of...