Religion & Society

“Places of worship have become a topic of much dispute around the world in recent years”, said Dr Melissa Crouch at the launch of a new report at the Melbourne University Law School on June 26. “Examples are the Swiss ban on minarets in 2009 and the 2010 Ground Zero mosque dispute in New York city,” she added. Her talk focused on a report entitled “Disputed Churches in Jakarta”, published in Indonesian by the Center for Religious and Cross- Cultural Studies of Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta and translated into English by the Melbourne Law School. Indonesia has witnessed a significant increase in attacks on churches since the fall of the Suharto regime in 1998. An average of fifteen such attacks occurred each year between 1968-98, but a staggering 232 churches were damaged or destroyed between 1999-2001 alone. The new report is based on extensive fieldwork by Indonesian researchers from the Jakarta-based Paramadina Foundation’s Research Team into controversies. It particula...

Is the West experiencing irreversible decline, with other nations and cultures moving to fill the resulting vacuum? This question was considered by Professor Michael Cox of the London School of Economics on 1 September at St Michael’s Uniting Church, Melbourne in the 6th Annual Lecture of La Trobe University’s Centre for Dialogue. Addressing an audience of around 200, Professor Cox began with a challenge. “The consensus is that a significant power shift is taking place,” he said, “but I am somewhat sceptical. Such an approach sees some nations rising while others decline. Isn’t there a better way to think about this?” Speaking of the 1990s, he said “the view was that the West had triumphed over the Soviet Union.” The power shift theory emerged in connection with President George W. Bush’s War on Terror. “Many argued that Bush had gone for broke and had failed.” This foreign policy setback was compounded in 2007/08 with the international financial crisis. “Faith in the American ...

In recent months a Christian-Muslim controversy has preoccupied the population of Sydney. A Muslim outreach group, MyPeace [www.mypeace.com.au/] under the leadership of Muslim Australian activist Diaa Mohamed, has erected a series of large billboards promoting Islam in prominent positions around the city. So far three billboards have been erected, variously declaring “Jesus: a prophet of Islam”, "Abraham, Noah, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad: Prophets of Islam" and ''Mary and prophet Jesus: read about their lives in the [Qur’an]”. Explaining the motives of MyPeace, Mr Mohamed referred to widespread misunderstanding of Islam among non-Muslims, stating that the billboards were primarily designed to clear away misconceptions. “We've been accused of trying to convert people to Islam and all that sort of stuff. If this was a campaign to do that, I would say it openly,” said Mr Mohamed. “This particular campaign was just to build bridges and extend a hand." Reactions fr...

In 2006 the Australian conservative coalition government introduced the federally-funded National School Chaplaincy Program (NSCP). Then Prime Minister John Howard commented at the time: “Students need the guidance of chaplains, rather than just counsellors… To call a chaplain a counsellor is to bow to political correctness. Chaplain has a particular connotation, people understand it, they know exactly what I'm talking about.” [ABC News 29 October, 2006] Interestingly, in August 2010, the newly appointed centre-left Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard pledged a further A$222m toward extending the NSCP to at least 1000 more Australian schools. Currently, the majority of the 633 state schools in the state of Queensland receive federal funding for school chaplaincy. Many schools in other states also receive funding under the NSCP. The Writ A writ was issued out of the High Court of Australia on Tuesday December 20, 2010. A website in support of the Plaintiff, Mr Ronald Williams...

Today, the expression, “shari‘a” – as in “shari‘a law” and “shari‘a finance” – is heard with increasing frequency. It is important to get clear on just what shari‘a is, particularly since some Muslims wish to bring it to prominence and even dominance around the world. The great Western scholar of Islamic law, Joseph Schacht, once described the shari‘a as "the core and kernel of Islam itself."1 The concept appears obliquely in the Qur’an at verse 45:18: “Then We put thee on the (right) Way of Religion [shari‘a]: so follow thou that (Way), and follow not the desires of those who know not.” This passage underpins the common Muslim claim that shari‘a law is divinely sourced, fixed and immutable, a gift to humanity from Allah, designed to show Muslims how to live and govern correctly. Of course, there are different schools of interpretation. By the middle of the eighth century A.D., several had emerged in the Muslim Abbasid Empire. Of these, four survived among majority Sunni Musl...

“I cannot do everything but I must not do nothing,” said Baroness Caroline Cox of Queensbury, concluding two seminars during her recent visit to Melbourne. She was here as part of a national tour connected with the work of the Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust (HART), of which she is international CEO. At a reception held for her at Parliament House on 7 October, Baroness Cox emphasised the need to “speak for those who can’t speak for themselves.” She explained that her HART teams “especially aim to reach those under oppression and persecution who are not accessible to large aid organisations that depend on government approvals to do their work.” She cited the case of the devastating Burma cyclone disaster of 2008, when the Burmese military junta prevented aid organisations from reaching many of the victims. In her presentations, the Baroness spoke at length about the situation in Burma, where 30,000 Karen and 10,000 Shan refugees were driven from their homes into the jungle by the junta i...

While hung parliaments are a relatively common occurrence in some countries, there have only been two in Britain since World War Two: those that followed the elections of February 1974 and May 2010. It is curious that Australia should also produce a hung parliament within 4 months of Britain, the first at the national level since the elections of 1940. Australia’s August election campaign has been described as “boring” by many commentators, but in terms of faith matters it produced some colourful and controversial statements. Until June 2010 everybody expected the governing Australian Labor Party to be led into these elections by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, a practicing Anglican. He was expected to do battle with the Liberal-National coalition parties led by Tony Abbott, a practicing Catholic. The discourse surrounding their rivalry only rarely had sectarian overtones; it was more commonly pointed out in media comment that both leaders were Christians, rather than being cast in terms of...