October 2010

Read all the news stories from General Synod, held in Melbourne last month.

TMA has again been recognised for excellence, receiving three gold awards at the recent Australasian Religious Press Association Awards.

More than 50 years after Billy Graham helped transform the face of Christian Australia, Ridley Melbourne’s principal, the Revd Canon Dr Peter Adam, is confident that another voice of faith from North America has sown the seeds of Christian renewal.

The Church has not equipped Christians to deal with the values many of them face in the workplace, the Revd Dr Bruce Kaye, the former General Secretary of General Synod said last month at a conference held in Melbourne on Australian Spirituality.

Engagement with as wide a range of people as possible was Archbishop Philip Freier’s aim when, on coming to Melbourne from the Northern Territory, he launched his Prayer for Melbourne Quest.

In his September ‘Conversation with the Archbishop,' Archbishop Freier discussed the role which ordinary Australians, and religion, can play in helping those with mental illness.

Long-time contributor to TMA’s Growing in Faith column, Professor Emeritus Hedley Beare, AM, died peacefully last month after a long battle with cancer.

A leading UK evangelical, Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, considered challenges facing the church from radical Islam and militant secularism during his recent visit to Melbourne.

Hundreds of refugees from around Melbourne gathered at the Box Hill Town Hall on 5 September to participate in the city’s largest refugee festival.

Population growth is not the fundamental environmental problem, but our greed and over-consumption, according to the Dean of Wollongong. He has fallen for a popular population myth!

Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking says in his latest book* that the big questions of life can be answered “within the realms of science.” Stephen Ames explains why he thinks such a conclusion is flawed.

This month on October 17 the Pope will formally declare (canonise) Blessed Mary MacKillop to the final stage of becoming an acknowledged saint.

Among the many "how to" guides to ministry, there is not much theological analysis of collaborative ministry.

This is an important book, which should be read by all Anglicans concerned about the future of their church in Australia.

If you tiptoed through the Global Financial Crisis, hoping no one would ask you to define a hedge fund or explain the problem with the sub-prime mortgage market, you might be scared off by the first ten minutes of Wall Street – Money Never Sleeps.

Please Give is an odd film. At the abrupt ending you feel rather as though someone had opened a door on a collection of people’s lives and then shut it again when you had become really involved.

The new Channel 7 reality show, Four Weddings, features people I would mostly not want to meet and values with which I violently disagree, and yet there is an awful fascination about it.

Almost 100 parishes around the Diocese took part in Back To Church Sunday on 12 September.