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A West Gippsland church hopes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and encourage eco-conscious tourists to its town through its new electric vehicle charging outlet.
Yarragon Uniting Church’s slow electric vehicle charger is part of a network of public outlets the Baw Baw Shire Council has created across the region recently.
The slow charger is helping the church to improve accessibility to public EV charging stations and encourage electric car drivers to spend time in the area.
Parishioner Peter Kingwill said the church aimed to increase its zero climate impact goals and support the town as a destination for eco-conscious tourists through the project.
A new research report, Trust in Religion among Women in Australia, highlights some electoral realities relevant to legislating to protect religion in Australia today.
The report analyses data from the nationally representative Australian Cooperative Election Survey, taken from May 2–18 2022. It surveyed 1,044 voters, of whom 531 were women.
It analysed the data for both men and women, and it was found that women are significantly more likely than men to express distrust in religion.
For the more than half a million Australians who identify as Orthodox Christians, today is a significant day.
Sunday May 5 is Orthodox Easter, a date which falls more than a month after the more-widely recognised western Easter Sunday which is celebrated as a public holiday in Australia.
In both churches, Easter is considered the most important and holy occasion in the Christian calendar.
And while the date is different in each church, the fundamental meaning of Easter remains the same, centred around the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus.
“How good is God?”
Some might take that question as a philosophical inquiry about the existence of evil in a world supposedly ruled by a merciful deity.
Australians, however, may recognise the banal “daggy dad” speech pattern of former prime minister Scott Morrison.
In Plans for Your Good: A Prime Minister’s Testimony of God’s Faithfulness, “How good is God?” is not a question, it’s a rhetorical preamble to a book that uses crucial political issues and personal anecdotes as mere springboards to rapturous praise of the Christian faith.
There was a time, not so long ago, that Donald Trump did not seem to be very familiar with the Bible.
When he first ran for the nomination of the very Christian Republican party, Trump was unable to name a single Bible verse. Early in his 2016 presidential campaign he referred to the Eucharist as a “little cracker”. In a subsequent church visit, as he attempted to prove his religious credentials, he put cash in a plate that was meant to hold the communion.
How times have changed.
Women’s rights activist and author Ayaan Hirsi Ali expressed regret for her previous critiques of Christianity at the inaugural Dissident Dialogues conference in New York over the weekend. Ali, a former figurehead in the New Atheism movement, openly recanted her past assertions that all religions, including Christianity, were equally damaging.
During a lively discussion with evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins on Saturday, Ali elaborated on her transformation, revealing that her past belief — that religions were uniformly destructive — was misguided.
“I do regret doing that,” she confessed to Freddie Sayers, editor-in-chief of UnHerd and the moderator of the event. She admitted to the unintended consequences of her advocacy, which included promoting skepticism over faith without offering a viable moral alternative, thereby leaving a void in the cultural and moral framework that she now believes Christianity beneficially fills.
In a historic meeting, Anglican Communion primates from around the world have attended an audience with Pope Francis at the Vatican, during the morning of May 2.
In the hour-long meeting the Pope shared words of encouragement and affirmation, in conversation with the primates, responding to questions from those gathered. In his address, Pope Francis spoke about themes of synodality, church unity and the prioritization of relationships, Christian love and service.
The Pope said: “Only a love that becomes gratuitous service, only the love that Jesus taught and embodies, will bring separated Christians closer to one another. Only that love, which does not appeal to the past in order to remain aloof or to point a finger, only that love which in God’s name puts our brothers and sisters before the ironclad defence of our own religious structures, only that love will unite us. First our brothers and sisters, the structures later.”
“The number of individuals in the United States who do not identify as being part of any religion has grown dramatically in recent years, and “the nones” are now larger than any single religious group”, writes Christopher P. Scheitle and Katie Corcoran, associate professors of Sociology at West Virginia University.
According to the General Social Survey, religiously unaffiliated people represented only about 5 per cent of the US population in the 1970s. This percentage began to increase in the 1990s and is around 30 per cent today.
From this survey, some may assume that this means 1 in 3 Americans are atheists, but this is far from the truth. The truth is that there are many shades of “none”.
The bad news for Southern Baptists is that the denomination, the nation’s largest Protestant group, shrunk in 2023, with a drop of about a quarter-million people.
The good news, according to the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual statistical report, is that the decline slowed from 2022. In addition, of those who remained, more went to church and more newcomers took the plunge to get baptized.
The SBC’s 2024 Annual Church Profile, released Tuesday, showed that membership dropped to 12.9 million members, the lowest since the late 1970s. Having peaked at 16.3 million in 2006, membership has been in decline ever since, with nearly 3.5 million members in total lost. About half of that total loss has come since 2018.
“Lord, please help me say the right thing. Please, please don’t let me mess this opportunity up”, writes Dhanu Eliezer, part time theological student and follower of Jesus.
These are the words Eliezer says to herself in a panic when she finds herself in conversation with a friend or colleague and wants to share Jesus with them. She refers to this as her panic prayer.
These opportunities of sharing the Lord with her close ones tend to come when she least expects it. While in the past she has often walked away from beginning these conversations out of fear, she has recently been challenged by the wisdom that Colossians 4:2-6 offers to be ready when future opportunities for these conversations arise.
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