Queensland Synod News

Christians and secular groups in India have commemorated the 2 October anniversary of the birth of Mahatma Gandhi, but attacks against Christians continued on a day that marks the Indian independence campaigner’s message of non-violence. More than 100 Christian houses were torched in the troubled city of Kandhamal and nearby district of Boudh in the Orissa district as the nation ...

Christian Internet bloggers have received 10 commandments to help them avoid the danger of writing in haste what they might later regret at leisure. Unlike the Ten Commandments of the Bible, the cyberspace injunctions have not been written on tablets of stone but on the Web site of Britain’s Evangelical Alliance (http://www.eauk.org/articles/blogging-ten.cfm). Bloggers – writers of Internet diary and comment ...

ANTI-POVERTY WEEK in 2008 starts on Sunday 12 October and ends on Saturday 18 October. The UN’s International Anti-Poverty Day is Friday 17 October. Anti-Poverty Week was established in Australia as an expansion of the UN’s annual International Anti-Poverty Day. The main aims of Anti-Poverty Week are to strengthen public understanding of the causes and consequences of poverty and hardship ...

A City of London financial analyst has advised the (Anglican) Church of England to open a debate on the subject of its financial investments after senior church leaders called for tighter regulation of the markets. "If the church wants to get a reasonable return on its money, it cannot go for the lowest risk and the lowest growth," analyst Mark ...

The global financial crisis should not derail progress that has been made on fighting poverty worldwide, religious leaders have said, adding that the current financial market turmoil makes attempts to tackle deprivation all the more urgent. "When the powers that be declare there is an emergency, there is mobilisation," said the Rev. David Beckmann, president of the Washington-based anti-hunger group ...

Karl Marx, the intellectual father of modern communism, was partly right in his criticism of capitalism, the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has said in an article about the crisis hitting the world’s financial markets. "Marx long ago observed the way in which unbridled capitalism became a kind of mythology, ascribing reality, power and agency to things that had no ...

Traffic came to a standstill in central Bangalore in Karnataka state on 25 September, as thousands of Christians took part in protest rallies against a wave of violence directed against them in eight of India’s regional states. At the end of a rally organized by the Karnataka Christian Federation, participants staged a sit-down protest in front of a statue of ...

A prominent Roman Catholic theologian from Poland has rejected a demand from the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to retract and rewrite an article criticising its attitude to other Christian churches. "It’s another sad story about how Rome sends out condemnations of theologians," said Waclaw Hryniewicz, a founder member of an international commission for theological dialogue between ...

The vice-chairperson of a United Nations climate panel has said churches can contribute to reducing the impact of global warming by proposing new lifestyles. "The risks connected with climate change have dramatically increased since 2001. Nevertheless, there is no fatalistic view of the future," said Professor Jean-Pascal van Ypersele of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "There are ways ...

ASPLEY UNITING Church’s ideas of an AM service changed recently. It wasn’t Sunday morning and it was FM when they joined Brisbane radio station 96.5FM for a broadcast at the Aspley East State School. There was plenty of service as congregation members helped with breakfast, inflated balloons and coloured-in with children during the The Family Show broadcast. When the radio ...