If governments are to maintain public support for their military ventures, war narratives must be kept simple and consistent. The underlying message must not change: the West is always the innocent victim of terrorism, never its perpetrator.
Showing his stripes: visiting a favela in Brazil in 2013.
Tânia Rêgo/Agência Brasil
The pope’s encyclical turns climate change into a moral discussion by focusing on the disproportionate impact of climate change on poor countries and regions.
Australians are surprisingly bad at thinking about the place of religion in society.
AAP/Tracey Nearmy
Australia has an apparent conflict between religious freedom and sexual anti-discrimination legislation. It is particularly prominent in three areas: marriage, education, and social service provision.
The sacrament of marriage that takes place in the eyes of God is a separate process from the state’s legal recognition of the coupling.
Shutterstock/MNStudio
The sacrament of marriage does not depend on the law, which exists only to regulate the rights and responsibilities arising from the practice. For religious believers, same-sex marriage won’t change their union.
A miniature orc from the popular role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons.
Bart Heird/flickr
If the commands of reason really do require a god, then that god exists beyond reasonable doubt. Agree? Disagree? Read on …
What possesses a Queensland teenager like Oliver Bridgeman to go to fight in Syria? Online propaganda is not an adequate explanation on its own.
Facebook
Simplistic views of terrorist recruitment focus on online messages to Western youth. Foreign fighters are coming from many other countries, lured by many means, and we need more sophisticated responses.
The earliest sources, including Paul’s letters, show very little interest in the mythological details of heavenly existence.
Wikimedia Commons/ Probably Valentin de Boulogne: Saint Paul Writing His Epistles.
Interpretations of Paul the apostle’s texts provided the basic fund of imagery that continues to inform popular opinion about what Christians mean when they talk about “heaven”, or “hell”.
Which religion fits you?
Religion thumbprints via SunnySideUp/www.shutterstock.com
Australia has a form of secularism where religion is allowed in the public sphere. As long as religion remains one voice and one option among many, the nation will still be secular.
Religion can be a force for peace, the goal of these Australian religious leaders, or conflict – the believer and not the religion itself bears the responsibility.
AAP/Tracey Nearmy
There are religious and non-religious extremists and we should not confuse violent believers with religion itself, which has a long history of peacemaking.
The Dalai Lama has been coy about his successor.
Sergio Carvalho/Flickr
The proposition that Easter is a 100% Christian affair is manifestly unsustainable. It shows an ignorance of history. Worse, it shows a failure to understand the way religious traditions work.
Gay couple Andrew Wale (on right) and Neil Allard hold hold each other as they are interviewed by the media after marrying in the first same-sex wedding at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, southern England March 29, 2014.
Reuters/Luke MacGregor
The Presbyterian Church (USA) vote to allow gay marriage will have multiple consequences now and in decades to come.
A Rabbi contemplates the desecration of hundreds of Jewish graves in France, where one of the youths arrested denied anti-Semitism was their motive.
EPA/Patrick Seeger
Philip Wilson, the Catholic Archbishop of Adelaide, is the most senior clergyman in the world to face a charge of concealing sexual abuse in the church.
Director of the Wesley Centre for Theology, Ethics, and Public Policy & Associate Professor, New Testament, Pilgrim Theological College, University of Divinity