It may be a perennial party favourite but ping pong is at the heart of a nation-wide campaign to help end the exploitation and trafficking of young people throughout South East Asia. Ben Rogers reports on the Ping Pong-A-Thon and one Uniting Church teenager picking up the paddle to make a difference. In 2011, a group of Aussies endured a ...
Read More »Tag Archives: Ben Rogers
The gospel according to Pasolini
Since his violent death—shrouded in the kind of controversy that plagued his working life—history has yet to produce a cultural figure quite like Pier Paolo Pasolini. Known in his native Italy for his reputation as a Marxist, gay atheist, Pasolini stretched the definition of a multi-hyphenate to its limit when it came to his professional endeavours: he was (in)famous for ...
Read More »Ken Ham: A Queenslander with all the Answers
When it comes to divisive Australian Christians, they don’t get much bigger than Ken Ham. Ben Rogers interviews the Queensland creationist who is grabbing news headlines for his $100 million Noah’s ark replica. The recent public unveiling of Ken’s Ark Encounter attraction in Kentucky, North America, brought the kind of media attention you’d expect from building a faith-themed mega-structure 155 ...
Read More »Expanded: Ken Ham in his own words
When you construct a gargantuan $100 million Noah’s ark replica in the heart of America’s “Bible belt”, chances are you’ll gain attention. Lots of it. Ken Ham is the controversial driving force behind the Ark Encounter and sure enough, the media has flocked to Kentucky, North America to cover his impressive feat of taking the specifications in Genesis 6:15 and ...
Read More »August 2016 Journey now available
This edition brings profiles of two Christian Queenslanders who offer radically different perspectives on faith: Ken Ham (page 6) and Val Webb (page 10). While Val emphasises the importance of questioning in faith and brings an unmistakable progressivism to Christianity, Ken has an intense certainty in the Old Testament as literal history and is getting people around the world talking, ...
Read More »July 2016 Journey now available
The Rogers household has a laugh whenever politicians or government bureaucrats talk about ideologically-neutral educational material in schools. If some are so desperate to remove religion from schools, then shouldn’t they prioritise thinking about how the religion of the “state” is presented to children? The way in which government has omnipotent authority to exempt itself from the rules it imposes ...
Read More »The Trial of a Country Donkey: Au Hasard Balthazar
Noted for his austere formal style and unique approach to performance, French filmmaker Robert Bresson is globally celebrated as a master of the cinematic arts. He has inspired generations of filmmakers including Martin Scorsese, Andrei Tarkovsky, the Dardenne brothers and Lars von Trier, and renowned screenwriter Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver) stated he was the “most important spiritual artist living—a spiritual ...
Read More »