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Ultimately, the business of churches is truth, not growth. Of course, a passion for truth might also lead churches to reflect on many of the unnecessary things that alienate people and prevent growth. But the great gift that churches can bring to public life is a care for truth.
What is missing in this theological use of reason is an imagination grounded in ordinary humanity and, in the case of Christians, in the humanity of Christ, the criterion for our knowledge of God.
Encounters between individuals come before discussion of ideology or religion. By engaging in a dialogue between cultures and civilisations, a clash of religions can be avoided.
When Australians have spoken about national providence, they associate it with a sense of mission. Mission and providence belong together. A God who played favourites would be subdivine. So God’s blessing must be given for all.
Links to the full text and audio of the speech delivered by Frank Brennan SJ at the Australian Catholic University on 29 July.
When I reflect on this conversation, I am also struck by how different what I see in daily life is from what I read and watch in the media about about Muslim militants, the clash between Christians and Muslims, fundamentalism, or terrorism. Every age has its own false ideas. In our time, it is the notion that identifies Islam with hostility and aggression.
It sounds nice. Until we begin to name names. Adolf Hitler, Jozef Stalin, Pol Pot, Osama Bin Laden. These are monsters. To suggest that God loves them is to sentimentalise God, and to remove any firm basis for morality.
The post-Enlightenment commitment to the rational testing of claims is important if we are avoid the excesses of fundamentalism. But it could be time to accept that the range of acceptable ideas has been too narrow.
You cannot worship God and Mammon, Jesus says. But when people see themselves as divided by their understanding of God, Mammon can be a bridge on which they can stand together and talk. Hermawan Kartajaya reminded me of this recently.
Questions of why Christianity has a personal and social morality of a particular shape demand a more complex account of Christian faith than that provided in Mr Rudd’s emphasis on Jesus’ practice or in Mr Abbott’s emphasis on moral law.
Every attempt to curb capitalism's voracious appetite, to ‘humanize’ its world-wide dominion, to place the world economy back in the service of the greater good, and thus temper its lust for unregulated growth, has not only failed, but has been assimilated.
For many Australians, Ash Wednesday is synonomous with the devastating bushfires of 1983. But a thousand years before the bushfires, Christians were beginning the season of Lent with Ashes, ensuring a gritty start for the road to Easter.
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