Here’s another reason I could never be a Roman Catholic. A press release from the World Youth Day Sydney, the religious extravaganza being staged by the Catholic Church in July this year, alerted me to the fact that Blessed Pier Georgio Frassati would be attending. The charismatic Blessed Pier Giorgio is revered for his social […]

Like many Aussies, I have struggled to balance my revulsion for extreme Islam’s repression of women with an open-minded acceptance of different values. That balance tilts over when I fear for my own life style, given that in this country, women driving, voting and wearing short sleeved shirts is still legal. Hilaly’s comments crossed that […]

Pope Benedict’s error wasn’t to criticise Islam, it was in not being prepared to back-up his criticism. His speech is a difficult one, and I wouldn’t pretend to understand it anywhere near completely. But I understand it enough to know a few things. It is disingenuous to suggest that he was making a minor point […]

The fact that this story surfaced 11 days ago and has yet to make the mainstream media says all you need to know about the balance of outrage in the Mohammed Cartoon controversy. In March this year a 21 year old accounts clerk in Singapore was called in for questioning under that country’s sedition laws […]

I’m getting out of the habit of blogging it seems. Or maybe I’m just too busy. We buried my Dad yesterday. He was 93, going on 94, and the major financial supporter of this site. That, and a conversation with a friend, set me thinking about God. God is a slippery concept, even for those […]

Indonesian PM Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is 180 degrees wrong when he says that the solution to the fight against terror is to be more tolerant of Muslim sensitivities. He couches this in terms of the argument about the Mohammed cartoons. He says that it is important to win the battle for “hearts and minds”. The […]

David McKnight recently suggested that people who are seen as nominally conservative, like Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, Dr Peter Jensen, could actually be new partners in the “progressive” project. From my occasional listening to Jensen’s Boyer Lectures McKnight could well be right. He and Jensen both seem to share a commitment to communitarianism. Last Sunday […]

The most fascinating aspect of the current debate about taking the political correctness out of “celebrating” Christmas has been the absence and silence of the mainstream Christian church leaders. The Prime Minister has a view, the Premier has a view, so do the radio “shock jocks”, and the citizenry has a view…but have we heard […]

How’s this for a variation on pundits predictions? If I had blogged on it I would have predicted that Philip Aspinall would become Primate of Australia, so can I count it as a successful prediction even though I never got around to committing a word to electrons? It was obvious. The Archbishops of Sydney and […]