author: Scott Stephens

  • AUSTRALIA

    Best of 2009: The case for Abbott as Opposition leader

    • Scott Stephens
    • 12 January 2010
    6 Comments

    Opposition presents the Liberal Party with a rare opportunity to recover its conservative soul and abandon Labor's vapid brand of politics. The only way forward is for the Party to replace Malcolm Turnbull with Tony Abbott as its leader. August 2009

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The case for Abbott as Opposition leader

    • Scott Stephens
    • 25 August 2009
    23 Comments

    Opposition presents the Liberal Party with a rare opportunity to recover its conservative soul and abandon Labor's vapid brand of politics. The only way forward is for the Party to replace Malcolm Turnbull with Tony Abbott as its leader.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Aged care in purgatory

    • Scott Stephens
    • 01 June 2009
    10 Comments

    Our failure to care for and honour our elderly is one of the great causes of moral impoverishment in our culture. Lives tempered by age and hard-earned virtue are gifts from God. It is to our detriment that we ignore them.

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  • RELIGION

    Hitchcock's Easter drama

    • Scott Stephens
    • 06 April 2009
    2 Comments

    Manny, terrified and bewildered, clutches a crucifix and prays, while lawyers spew jargon-laden bile at one another. It might seem strange to invoke a Hitchcock film at Easter, but we can see a similar horror at work in the trial of Jesus.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Climate change obscures the real moral crisis

    • Scott Stephens
    • 12 December 2007
    2 Comments

    The 2007 election saw the Howard Government caught in a perfect electoral storm. Boredom disconnected the Coalition from the electorate, and the refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol left the Government stranded in a kind of moral no-man's land.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Mark Latham's War on Everything

    • Scott Stephens
    • 14 November 2007
    2 Comments

    Perhaps the clearest indication of the underwhelming torpor that has become the defining feature of the federal election campaign, is the fact that its highlights have been provided by luminaries of Labor past — Paul Keating and Mark Latham.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Kevin Rudd's political cowardice

    • Scott Stephens
    • 17 October 2007
    11 Comments

    The great hypocrisy of Kevin Rudd’s style of politics is that he launched his challenge for the Labor leadership twelve months ago with an appeal to Dietrich Bonhoeffer. One cannot help but be sickened by his recent rebuke of the politically and morally courageous Robert McClelland, for expressing unbridled opposition to capital punishment in Indonesia.

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  • RELIGION

    Delivering the mentally disabled from evil

    • Scott Stephens
    • 19 September 2007
    7 Comments

    Superiority and the benevolence of modern science and the health-care system, versus the cruel, more ancient practice of ostracising the sick from civic life.

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  • RELIGION

    Bishop John Shelby Spong and consumer-friendly religion

    • Scott Stephens
    • 05 September 2007
    4 Comments

    Western Buddhism and Pentecostalism are sometimes criticised as self-indulgent forms of religion. Is Bishop Spong's Christian humanism any different?

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Iraq's Asia Cup victory hides reality of ungovernable society

    • Scott Stephens
    • 08 August 2007
    5 Comments

    The press coverage of Iraq’s surprise victory in the Asian Cup final was — as Ernst Bloch might have put it — full of utopian sentiment. The win was, admittedly, a remarkable achievement, but one that hardly accounted for the sheer exuberance of the outpoured emotion that followed.

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  • RELIGION

    Hitchens returns to bosom of Left to denounce God

    • Scott Stephens
    • 13 June 2007
    5 Comments

    In God is not Great, Christopher Hitchens dismisses religion as the invention of hucksters and frauds. Although he has abandoned his leftist position, this is a straightforward reiteration of Marx’s own critique of religion.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    A comfortable nation afraid to get off the couch

    • Scott Stephens
    • 05 June 2007
    3 Comments

    John Howard’s "relaxed and comfortable" approach to national life, then, was not simply a rejection of Paul Keating’s aggressive, deliberate reforms. It represented a vile pandering to our cultural inertia, an affirmation of our basest tendencies.

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