Trevor L Jordan, PhD. To this day, it remains a mystery to me how the words and actions of an African American Baptist preacher from the Southern states of the USA could influence a young, white teenager from suburban Brisbane. The streets of Graceville in the 60s were not exactly seething with radicalism and dissent. […]

CHRISTIAN CENTURY – Cheap resistance is like cheap grace. It risks very little… In Maria Schrader’s 2016 biopic, Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig argues that “every gesture of resistance which is void of either risk or impact is nothing but a cry for recognition.” This is a useful bar to set for ourselves. Do our gestures of […]

When I think of how I can live my life well, I reflect on the life of my good friend, elder and mentor, Allan Halladay. Allan’s Story Allan Halladay was born on May 28th 1937 in Nipawin, a small rural town in Northern Saskatchewan, Canada. Allan said: ‘Like most small towns there was a co-op […]

A reflection on working for the Common Good by some British friends … For some years now, Together for the Common Good, along with other advocates of the common good, has been signalling that the current (social) settlement is no longer fit for purpose. In the past couple of years we’ve seen a decline of […]

Why I Left Westboro Baptist Church (TED TALK) What’s it like to grow up within a group of people who exult in demonizing … everyone else? Megan Phelps-Roper shares details of life inside America’s most controversial church and describes how conversations on Twitter were key to her decision to leave it. In this extraordinary talk, she […]

LAURIE GOODSTEIN NEW YORK TIMES – Protecting immigrants is shaping up to be a priority of the religious left, an amorphous collection of people and groups reflecting many faiths and ethnicities. It has been jolted into action by Mr. Trump’s victory and his selection of an attorney general nominee who supports a crackdown on immigrants… […]

Simon Smart I once had a fight with my wife over a Tim Winton book. Well, not really a fight, but let’s say, a spirited disagreement. We had both just finished reading Breath and she was more than a little annoyed at her erstwhile literary hero Winton, for what she perceived to be his overly […]

Sister Maria is an 80-year-old Italian nun who arrived in the DRC in 1959, one year before its independence. Since 1984, she has worked as a midwife in Zongo at the hospital, which is run by the Congregation of the daughters of Saint-Joseph of Genoni from Italy. Sister Maria moves around the hospital as if […]

John Pavlovitz, Pastor and Writer, Updated: 08/12/2015 09:59 I used to think that it was just me, that it was my problem, my deficiency, my moral defect. It had to be. All those times when I felt like an outsider in this American Jesus thing; the ever-more frequent moments when my throat constricted and my heart raced […]

Peggy Gish   In 2009, Boko Haram militants entered Monica Dna’s home in the middle of the night. Monica watched them behead her husband and slit the throats of two of her three sons. Then, turning to her, they slashed her left arm as she raised it in defense, cut her throat, and left her […]

What he’s most proud of is that he didn’t fire a single shot. Didn’t kill a single person. Didn’t lead his country into a war – legal or illegal. “We kept our country at peace. We never went to war. We never dropped a bomb. We never fired a bullet. But still we achieved our […]

Deep Abiding Love in Afghanistan: the Life and Work of Dan Terry by David Wildman Before his death at age 64 in August 2010, Dan Terry had worked with Global Ministries in Afghanistan for nearly 40 years. He was one of ten volunteers who were conducting a Nuristan Eye Camp when they were ambushed in […]