Opinion

I HAVE enjoyed two DVDs recently that have made me think about the relationship between faith and belief in a higher power and the mind. Both films originate from a very secular understanding of faith, which is one of the things I enjoyed about them. Both films ask if faith and the idea of the soul are purely constructs of ...

WHEN ASKED the question “Why do you volunteer”? I had to think about it for a while. Growing up in the Northmead Methodist Church in New South Wales volunteering has been part of my life for more than 50 years. It was something I just did. Volunteering to me means serving without asking for reward and caring for those who ...

AS A NEW migrant to Australia I need to strengthen my community relations and break down barriers of fear and misunderstanding. Volunteering helps me meet new people and make new friends. It promotes my self-growth and I can use my skills and learn new social skills or even technical skills which are related to the Australian social and work culture. ...

WE LIVE in a world of opposites; opposites of opportunity, hope, and life itself. For many of us, and certainly for me, my life lived is a life blessed. And so it is for almost all of my family members, friends, and colleagues. But for many others, for the majority world, for many, many of our fellow citizens it is ...

I HAVE just returned from a visit with the United Church of the Solomon Islands where I had the remarkable experience of a church, indeed a country, that exists on the strength of volunteers. I saw wonderful infrastructure and human services that exist because of volunteers. I had several conversations with a group of Rotary volunteers from Rockhampton and Bundaberg. ...

THE DAY before I wrote this I heard Peter Gabriel’s song Solsbury Hill on the radio. That night over a good red I told my husband that that was the song I wanted played at my funeral. Now apart from completely categorising me as a new romantic, this song says a lot about my understanding of life and death. Mr ...

ONE OF THE traditional ways of presenting the death of Jesus is to describe it as a sacrifice. That is problematical for many people in contemporary society. The church’s great theologians through the centuries proposed various theories to explain how the death of Jesus saves us. Some of these old theories survive today and are still used to test a ...

Much has been said in recent years about the resurrection of Jesus Christ, with a plethora of pseudo scholarship, making the argument that because of our so-called advanced knowledge of science, and how the world ‘really’ works, that it is impossible (for them), that the resurrection of Jesus really happened. This is all in the name of an arrogantly, self ...

I KNOW nothing about art. When I visited the art galleries of Europe I admit that I didn’t really understand most of the art works I saw, and sometimes wondered why they are called art and deserved a place in a gallery. However I remember the wisdom of a minister of my childhood, who said that a person who says ...

I KNOW it is summer when the ABC tells me cricket is on the radio. I’m not a cricket fan. It’s a peculiar game. I’m keener about religion than I am about cricket, because I don’t understand all the intricacies and petty rules applied by the governing cricket bodies. That said, I was interested in the news stories when Australians ...