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In April the Victorian Court of Appeal upheld an earlier ruling that a youth camp run by the Christian Brethren had discriminated illegally against same-sex attracted persons by refusing a booking from a community health service for an event for young gay and lesbian people. This is not an isolated case. It is sobering that churches often seem to need the courts to give them lessons, if not about sex, then about hospitality and fairness.
Australian-born creationist Ken Ham argues that every human is descended from Adam and Eve, that God created man and all land animals on the same day 6000 years ago, and that there were dinosaurs on Noah's Ark. The relationship between faith and reason goes to the credibility of being a Christian in the modern world. A minority view within Christianity should not be allowed to frame a false dichotomy between religion and science.
They say there's humour in the Bible, but I am not so sure. The scholars cite a joke or two. Why aren't there rather more? The Book of Psalms (one twenty-six) has mouths that 'filled with laughter' — but that's no consolation if a smiting's coming after.
Recently Pope Francis blasted the so-called trickle-down economic theories in his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium. Some will scorn his message as naive at best and dangerous at worst, while others will regard it as an urgent enkindling of hope in the face of degradation and despair. The Christmas story hints that another kind of world is possible.
'Having thrown off the shackles of compulsion endured by pre-Vatican II Catholics, we relish that we come to the table not because we are forced, not because of social expectations, not because of the mindset of the mob, but because we are graciously called and freely responding.' Frank Brennan's Camino Address, Parish of Our Lady of the Way North Sydney, 12 November 2013
In the 1970s the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the mental health 'bible', listed homosexuality as a mental illness. Many disagreed, and so in the stroke of an editorial pen hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, were cured. The DSM is a socially constructed manual, put together by those with a vested interest in mental health.
His casual tone didn't seem to fit the words I was translating from Spanish. I questioned him. Eight? Yes, eight. Every night? Every night. Finally I could no longer deny what I was hearing. Decades earlier, my amigo's then eight-year-old brother had been abused by a religious man of the cloth. My amigo was here walking the Camino Mozárabe in memory of that brother, who eventually had committed suicide.
Knowing I was going to spend six months in Greece, I arranged for a trunk of books to be sent over. My illiterate mother-in-law was stupefied: 'So many books! Can't you sell some of them?' I should have known she'd react like this, as during her one visit to Melbourne she'd told me roundly that too much reading was the cause of my prematurely grey hair and my need to wear glasses.
The 2011 book Five Uneasy Pieces offered an alternative reading of the so-called 'clobber passages' that are at the core of religious unease about homosexuality. A follow-up volume pushes the envelope further by examining the biblical recognition of the variety of human love beyond traditional marriage.
The relationship between the Catholic Church and the poor was explored most seriously in Latin America. I caught its dimensions most vividly in a dawn trip on a clapped out US school bus to a small regional town in El Salvador.
Geoff Shaw, who belittled the now-traditional 'welcome to country' and publicly equated gays with dangerous drivers, is currently the most powerful man in Victorian politics. His resignation helped ensure the downfall of the humane and likeable Ted Ballieu, whose achievements as Premier jarred with pre-election promises.
I was in Dili on Apology Day 2008, and wept as I listened on the radio to the Apology offered by Kevin Rudd. The previous year, I had arrived in Dili to take up a post with an aid and development program, and was accosted by a very angry young man. 'What are you doing here? Have you come to make us like your Aboriginal people?'
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