Religion & Society

On 15 August Melbourne School of Theology (MST) hosted the visit of Baroness Caroline Cox from the British House of Lords. Baroness Cox has been a fearless campaigner for many years, advocating on behalf of the marginalised and the persecuted around the world as part of her work for the Humanitarian Aid and Relief Trust (HART), which has an active branch in Australia. In her presentation to a sizeable audience at MST, Baroness Cox gave attention to the drift towards secular liberalism in western societies and resulting challenges to minority groups, including Christians. She pointed out that “one of the effects of aggressive secular humanism in the UK is that many Christians now feel they suffer from discrimination and intimidation.” The same is true in Australia. Baroness Cox also referred to the co-existence of aggressive secular humanism’s assault on Christian faith and the growth of Islamist ideology.  While noting that the majority of the world's 1.2 billion Muslims, inclu...

I n the wake of World War II, as the world emerged from devastating conflict and entered the post-colonial era, some commentators predicted that rising prosperity would herald a new, post-religion age. The secularizing tendencies that were carving huge slices off religious allegiance in the West would be replicated across the world, according to this view. Such commentators also anticipated that religion, in its surviving form, would be rationalist, liberal and concerned with the here-and-now rather than the Hereafter. Read on here . This article first appeared in Renewing Minds: A Journal of Christian Thought , Jackson: Union University, Issue 2 (2012).

     Indonesia’s moderate Muslim President, Joko Widodo, has raised eyebrows amongst a strange assortment of civil libertarians, human rights activists, and radical Islamists, with a recent presidential decree declaring that groups which do not adhere to Indonesia’s national ideology will be banned. By doing so he has attracted accusations of being an old-style dictator, determined to suppress individual freedoms in the process.      There is a very clear subtext to this debate. In the early years of the 21st century, radical Islamist groups in Indonesia used newfound political freedoms to try to win a significant presence in the nation's parliament. However, in national elections of 1999, 2004, and 2009, such groups struggled to garner more than 10% of the popular vote. While this gave them some parliamentary representation, it was insufficient to move them forward in their stated desire to turn Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, into an Islam...

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

On Sunday June 25 I was interviewed by Clayton Bjelan on  89.9 LightFM , Australia's largest community radio station. The programme, "In conversation with Clayton", can be found here .

     The attacks in London on Saturday are the latest in a series of terror strikes that have led to the deaths of over 30 civilians of various nationalities. British PM Theresa May has expressed the outrage of most British people, declaring that “we cannot allow this ideology the safe space that it needs to breathe” and calling for the regulation of cyberspace to prevent the internet being used so effectively by terrorist groups to disseminate their poisonous ideology. These declarations by the British prime minister conceal a scandal. The signs of Britain’s current predicament were visible decades earlier, and successive prime ministers and cabinets proved incapable of anticipating the extent of the threat from Islamist terrorism.         A harbinger of Britain’s present problems was evident almost thirty years ago. In 1989, Iranian spiritual leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for the assassination of British author Salman Rus...