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As the Vatican releases the working document for the first Synod on Synodality, reactions within the Catholic community are mixed. While many applaud its open approach to divisive issues, others deem it too progressive or insufficiently thorough. Australian bishops encourage engagement, but the road ahead poses significant challenges.
When we reflect on how best to live with the consequences of our shared, bloodied history, The Australian Wars calls for a counter-narrative; a re-positioning and re-phrasing of what has brought us to this point in our oft-stalled journey towards reconciliation.
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).
After four years, the Fifth Plenary Council of Australia is nearly at a close with the second and final assembly in July. So what has been the significance of the Plenary Council so far, and what can we expect from the final session? In this Roundtable, Geraldine Doogue, John Warhurst, Greg Craven and Julian Butler reveal their hopes and expectations for the process and discuss likely outcomes.
The lives of migrants often consist of divisions and collisions at the border between the old life and the new. But sometimes both lives come together in unexpected ways, and one such conjunction is about to happen to me. On Anzac Day my granddaughter will join the great flow of Orthodoxy, but I hope one day she will know about her little trickle of Australian blood.
At this point, the media cycle is mostly internal, and while the media is talking to itself, Scott Morrison is talking to a rapidly growing base with significant resources. The devil isn’t in the headline here, the devil is in the detail, in the appeal itself.
But it is possible the members of the Plenary could begin to hear a deeper voice speaking in their hearts. There may arise a new courage to start a process of truth and reconciliation, reporting the process of this journey to the second Plenary Council planned for Sydney, July 2022. We can only begin that journey if members of the Plenary Council come and are open to listening to that deep inner voice.
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?
When I was a child and was asked 'How are you?', only once did I reply, 'I am good'. I still remember the rebuke from my Aunty Ivy, who explained that it is not for me to judge if I am 'good'; better to opt to be 'well'. She would be cross were a prime minister to go around asking 'how good' we are.
One reason for the importance of Epiphany in Eastern Orthodoxy is the belief that Christmas is a period during which the world is threatened by various wicked spirits, most particularly the kallikantzaroi, the spirits of the dead: at this time they emerge from Hades (via a cave not too far from where I live) and roam the Earth.
It wasn't all action. Sometimes they stopped in their tracks struck dumb by the thought that they had walked, talked, eaten and drunk with the Lord. How to explain that to their grandchildren! The story could not to be contained.