Australia’s Largest Christian News Site

In my last post, we looked at why disagreeing well is a dying art and its implications. In this week's post, we'll explore the first step to doing disagreements well.

While polarisation here in Australia isn't as bad as in the US, we’re not immune from it. Both non-Christians and Christians are increasingly quick to judge and slow to listen. And from what I’ve seen and experienced, we struggle to disagree agreeably. It’s a dying art.

While I share many people’s concerns about Trump’s character, Christians need to be careful how we think about this assassination attempt. Some may also be disappointed that the bullet merely wounded but didn’t kill him. But such thinking is unbiblical.

Our hope is not in the person in the White House or the Lodge, but in the King of Kings. This hope allows us to live non-anxiously with the messiness and brokenness of this world and its politics, knowing that our home and our security are not in a temporal country.

While I sympathise with Costello’s lament about the often-strong support many US Christians provide Trump, I am concerned by his argument. It’s one thing to say you disagree with Christians supporting Trump. It’s another to say Christians "condemn themselves" by supporting Trump.

Few things keep me awake at night like Artificial Intelligence. No, I’m not worried about Terminator-like robots taking over our world (at least not yet). But I am worried about the disruption AI will bring to every area of our lives – and very, very soon.

Over time, I learned some "game-changing" truths that changed how I responded to feelings of anxiety. Truths — grounded in the Bible and the best of modern psychology — that serve me well to this day.

The cry of the protesters is that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. But if that’s the case, Israel is doing a poor job at genocide. Even under Israeli occupation, the number of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza has increased by around 500%: is that a genocidal policy?

"Tribes" deals with the hottest topic in our culture right now: human identity. But not in a way you expect from our secular culture. I was encouraged to see a film about racial identity affirming our most basic identity: that we’re all human, and thus all equal in dignity and worth.

We’re all drawn to transcendence – to worshipping someone or something bigger than ourselves. For earlier generations, God (or nation) filled that primal human need. But now other things are filling it.

I never thought I’d cry reading a book on masculinity. But that’s what happened as I read The Manual – Getting Masculinity Right, by author Al Stewart. I felt strong emotions as I read a chapter that, for me, touched on the challenges of being a man in today’s world.

Democracy is fragile. It's not inevitable. Liberal democracies have only been around for the last few hundred years, and many around the world are floundering. Without shared bedrock beliefs like human equality, they revert to tribalism and fall apart.

Thanks to deepfake technology, we now need to be sceptical of images and videos we see online unless it’s from a verified source. Seeing is no longer believing in a deepfake world.

It’s a contradiction that lies beneath the surface of our moral conversations. It’s never talked about or discussed (at least not in public). And yet, this contradiction is corrosive: it upends the view of universal morality and human rights that nearly every secular person takes for granted.

Israel can commit particular acts that are immoral, without becoming morally equivalent to Hamas, in the same way that Western Allies could commit morally problematic acts (e.g. Dresden), without becoming morally equivalent to the Nazis.

Jordan Peterson recently gave a talk on 'Tilting the world toward Heaven and away from hell’  that some people are calling ‘the most inspiring speech he has ever given’.

While it’s shocking to hear Muslims in Western countries chanting ‘gas the Jews’, or the eliminationist ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, it’s equally concerning to hear non-Muslim Westerners writing off the atrocities of Hamas as ‘acts of resistance’.

We live in a divided world, from the conflict in the Middle East to the defeated Voice to Parliament. As I’ve thought about the various issues, here are 10 of my reflections on the Voice, and on the Israel situation.

When the current government calls Hungary a ‘Christian nation’, it’s not referring to a theocracy, but Christian in the sense of informing Hungary’s laws, customs and traditions.

Not too long ago, I took my teenage daughter and her friend to hear the singer Lorde in concert. There we are with 8000+ other fans, listening to Lorde’s Grammy Award-winning voice as she sings hits from her new Album Solar Power along with a few of her [...]