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Keywords: Christianity

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Insider outsider

    • Emma Wilkins
    • 27 September 2022
    2 Comments

    There's an assumption that writers shouldn’t be writing about groups they don't belong to, as if this couldn’t be done with honesty and insight, respect and restraint. Difficult, yes, but impossible? Whether in fiction or non-fiction, outsiders might misunderstand and misrepresent the people they depict, but sometimes, insiders will too. Sometimes, outsiders will lack insight, but sometimes, when they’re curious, attentive, when they do not overreach, they’ll capture truth.

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  • RELIGION

    Queen Elizabeth, the language of Christianity, and the defence of faith

    • Miles Pattenden
    • 15 September 2022
    4 Comments

    The Queen’s life of overt public religion — which led her to become perhaps the twentieth century’s greatest Christian evangelist — was grounded in her conviction in the Gospels’ truth. And she interpreted Jesus’ story generously and ecumenically, broadening her role from the narrow Anglican identity of Supreme Governor of the Church of England to become an advocate by example for faiths of every kind.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The book corner: Beyond belief

    • Barry Gittins
    • 12 August 2022

    Journalist and author Elle Hardy spent 15 months researching and writing her 2021 work Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity is Taking Over the World. She notes the estimation that by 2050, one billion people around the world (one in 10 humans) will be a Pentecostal follower of Jesus (and their pastor).

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  • RELIGION

    War, truth and Christianity

    • Peter Vardy
    • 21 July 2022
    5 Comments

    Pope Francis recognised that Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine was ‘perhaps somehow provoked’ and said he was warned before the war that Nato was ‘barking at the gates of Russia’. In an interview with the Jesuit magazine La Civiltà Cattolica the Pope condemned the ‘ferocity and cruelty of the Russian troops’ but warned against a fairy tale perception of the conflict as good versus evil.

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  • RELIGION

    Doctrine of Discovery: How a papal teaching subjugated Australia’s First Nations people

    • BJ Cruse
    • 07 July 2022
    7 Comments

    The subjugation of the world’s First Nations people was enshrined in the Doctrine of Discovery, a series of papal decrees made by Pope Alexander VI in 1493, where any land not inhabited by Christians was available to be ‘discovered,’ claimed, and exploited by Christian rulers. The Doctrine of Discovery legitimised Christian explorers’ claims to land uninhabited by Christians, promoting and fortifying Christian domination, and forcing original inhabitants into Christianity. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Broken: A profound study of Christianity and the priesthood

    • Paul Mitchell
    • 09 December 2021
    18 Comments

    Broken first aired on BBC1 in England in 2017. Four years to make it to Australia, but it was worth it. The series is a profound and powerful study of Christianity and what priesthood means, whether for the man holding up the bread at the altar, or that ‘priesthood of all believers’ to which Christianity’s adherents are said to belong.  

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  • FAITH DOING JUSTICE

    What would reconciliation in the Church look like?

    • NATSICC
    • 08 July 2021
    11 Comments

    The question of reconciliation in the Church is particularly pressing, given 2021 marks the 250th anniversary of the arrival of Christianity in Australia, and the 150th anniversary of the arrival of Christianity to the Torres Strait. Yet many First Australians recognise that the Spirit of God was poured out onto the original inhabitants of this great Southern Land many, many thousands of years prior.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Slow Train Coming: Bob Dylan’s spiritual journey

    • Paul Mitchell
    • 01 June 2021
    11 Comments

    Like the best religious poetry, Dylan’s works resists easy interpretation and remains open to endless meditation. Dylan’s overtly political songs — ‘Hurricane’, ‘Political World’ — and love songs — ‘Idiot Wind’, ‘Tangled up in Blue’ — have often been challenging. It’s the same with his religious output.

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  • RELIGION

    Behind the COVID curtain

    • Sally Cloke
    • 07 May 2020
    9 Comments

    Another biblical motif or metaphor may prove more fruitful in the long run: the apocalypse. No, not the end of the world, however appropriate this may feel. It’s the apocalypse but not as we know it.

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  • FAITH DOING JUSTICE

    Wrestling Morrison's brand of Christianity

    • Toni Hassan
    • 29 November 2019
    31 Comments

    His government continues to support, with massive subsidies, extractive and exploitative industries that undeniably warm the planet and threaten the natural environment. How can this be a legitimate perspective as a publicly-confessing Christian? Why would this shepherd not want to move all of us to safer ground?

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Scenes from the Land of Frankincense

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 13 December 2018
    2 Comments

    How delightful to see this country's mosques suffused with the scent of frankincense — not just on celebratory days, but always. And what a surprise it is to find that this place in whose proximity Christianity unfolded smells exactly — precisely — like Christmas.

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  • RELIGION

    Christianity tells stories; Islam finds designs

    • Michael McGirr
    • 31 October 2018
    21 Comments

    My year ten class studies Islam, one of the most formative influences in the world that my students will inhabit and hopefully improve. I have a profound respect for Islam. Westerners often fail to acknowledge the debt they owe to Islam, a tradition that had a huge role in bringing Europe through the Dark Ages and into the Renaissance.

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