Australia’s Largest Christian News Site

One of the realities that has not been taken into account sufficiently is that Australia is not really a "white" country in any meaningful sense. It is a multicultural country.

Conservatives have been pronouncing the failure of liberalism since the late 1960s. And yet liberalism continues to reign supreme as the unofficial state ideology of virtually all Western democracies.

The Voice referendum reveals some interesting dimensions of contemporary Australian culture that are being obscured by the political debate.

The digital revolution has democratised opinion, information and knowledge. There is now a proliferation of voices and perspectives. But has this revolution actually improved the quality of our opinion, information and knowledge? I think the truth is that the proliferation has simply burred and obscured [...]

I came across this fascinating argument from William of Ockham in the deliciously named On The Tyrannical Ascendancy of the Pope (early 1340s): "But after sin, because among men there grew up avarice and the desire to possess and use temporal things wrongly, it was [...]

This is a simple, yet profound, insight: "Identity politics wins not by making compelling arguments, but by exploiting the inherent decency of the American people."* I think too often people on the Right diagnose the success of identity politics by virtue of negative factors, like [...]

Has Western civilisation reached its nadir in its politico-economic development? Have we reached the end of "history"? No thesis has been more pooh-poohed than Francis Fukuyama's (routinely misunderstood) End of History thesis. Jonah Goldberg, in thinking about the "miracle" that is capitalism, makes a rare [...]

Putin seems to have bitten off more than he can chew by invading Ukraine. Caught in prolonged conflict, Russia may well jettison its leader. I don't believe in predictions. However, I do find it valuable to contemplate plausible future scenarios. So in that vein, here [...]

We all know that Christianity has bequeathed the world many civilisational advances in the past, from orphanages, schools and hospitals to the end of slavery and the emergence of human rights. But what innovations or advancements has Christianity produced in the last hundred years? Christianity [...]

A conservatism that focuses on individual freedom as the supreme virtue can only undermine Christianity, in the long run. If you emphasise freedom from government overreach, then it is a small step to seeing the need to free individuals from the reach of religion. The [...]

The modern Left is not actually against freedom, like many on the Right think. The problem with the Left is that it stands for a very selective freedom, born of a binary view of society that divides all people into oppressed and oppressor classes. The [...]

Are we all ultimately deep down liberals, but just can't see it, or can't bring ourselves to admit it? I mean, are all of us, whether conservative, progressive, libertarian, Marxist, anarchist, actually liberals in practice, whatever our public rhetoric? Yoram Hazony argues that "no human [...]

Been watching with interest the Elon Musk saga over at Twitter, and reflecting on the way people are trying (and struggling) to conceptualise the platform. There is much talk about it being a kind of town square or public square. This is wrong and misleading. [...]

I find "culture" to be one of the most contested, discussed, yet ill-defined, concepts out there. It is a notoriously difficult concept to define with any precision. I think a good place to start is: shared human practices and habits which are not enforced or [...]

Free speech is the lifeblood of a healthy society. But there are some legitimate constraints on free speech, in my view. 1) Defamation: the injury that can be done to individuals as a consequence of making false accusations in a digital age are so severe [...]