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Each Saturday, a dedicated group of Christians gather in Melbourne’s CBD to share the message of Jesus in a bustling, multicultural public square.
The outreach team has been present for over a decade, engaging with people from different faiths and cultural backgrounds.
The team aims to have meaningful conversations and challenge misconceptions about their faith in a complex ideological landscape.
Multicultural clergy of the Anglican Diocese of Melbourne thanked Archbishop Philip Freier for his support and encouragement when they gathered to farewell him at Holy Trinity East Melbourne recently.
The group meets twice a year to share stories of success and challenges in their ministry spaces, under the leadership of Bishop Paul Barker.
In a speech, Bishop Barker noted that the Melbourne diocese started engaging multiculturally during the time of Archbishop Penman, who invited clergy from overseas to join it.
A pastor in a secretive and extreme Pentecostal church has advocated corporal punishment of children as a way to prevent school shootings and gender dysphoria.
The leaked recording of the pastor advocating a “rod of correction” policy emerged as Victoria’s child safety watchdog expressed concern about practices at the Geelong Revival Centre.
Liana Buchanan, principal commissioner for children and young people, said the experiences and allegations recently revealed by former Geelong Revival Centre members were “extremely concerning”, and described some “unacceptable institutional responses”.
“Diwali was always a cultural, not a religious, festival for my family. To be honest, I celebrated it more enthusiastically than I did Eid,” writes Shirin Tejani, an economist currently based in Melbourne.
However, this year Tejani couldn’t bring herself to celebrate Diwali for two reasons: The global rise of Islamophobia, and the workplace discrimination she experiences last year, which still deeply affects her.
Peter’s chapel in Lucerne swaps out its priest to set up a computer and cables in confessional booth
The small, unadorned church has long ranked as the oldest in the Swiss city of Lucerne. But Peter’s chapel has become synonymous with all that is new after it installed an artificial intelligence-powered Jesus capable of dialoguing in 100 different languages.
Marco Schmid, a theologian with the Peterscapelle Church said “We wanted to see and understand how people react to an AI Jesus. What would they talk with him about? Would there be interest in talking to him? We’re probably pioneers in this.”
Pope Francis has asked the Vatican to study whether the Catholic Church should classify “spiritual abuse” as a new crime in order to address cases where priests use purported mystical experiences as a pretext for harming others.
A statement from the Vatican’s doctrinal office announcing the move did not name any specific cases of such abuse, but the Vatican has had to deal with several in recent years.
Cardinal Victor Fernandez, the Church’s lead doctrinal official, met with Francis to discuss the proposal for a new crime of spiritual abuse on Nov. 22, according to the statement. The pope directed Fernandez to work with another Vatican office to consider the issue, it said.
The Australian Christian Lobby has claimed that Labor’s hate speech laws would turn Australia into a “police state” by creating “thought crime” despite the fact the laws are directed towards threats of force or harm.
The Albanese government has substantially watered down the laws but is nevertheless facing a religious backlash, with the Catholic church and Christian Schools Australia claiming that the psychological harm definition will mean the view that sex is immutable will be outlawed as “hateful”.
In the past, Ethiopia’s Amhara region, located in the north near Sudan, has benefited from measures that included pairing community medical workers with religious leaders on community health drives.
This years-long strategy aims to strengthen the influence of community health workers in Ethiopia by taking advantage of the powerful position that religious leaders have.
With the assistance of priests, for example, vaccinations reduced the severity of the pandemic’s adverse effects and were essential in the Amhara region’s fight against the coronavirus disease.
What links these two news stories? The first: “manifesting” has been declared Cambridge Dictionary’s word of the year. The self-help practice, based on the magical belief that mental rituals can move the universe in your favour, has exploded in popularity.
The second news story: Jordan Peterson’s We Who Wrestle with God took the top spot on Amazon’s bestseller list last week shortly after its release on Tuesday. On the face of it, it’s a dry, pseudo-academic journey through the books of Genesis and Exodus – although it lurches now and then into the themes of Terminator 2, say, or The Lion King.
“Social media might come with a warning label, just like cigarettes,” writes Dave Chiswell, a Youth Minister at City on a Hill Geelong.
There is a growing unease about social media and what it might be doing to the mental health of young people.
The book titled The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (2024) by Jonathan Haidt is very relevant to parents and others ministering to the next generation amid this social media concern.
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