Christian Spirituality and Public Life

Something fundamental has shifted in how the world organizes itself. The architecture of international relations that emerged from the ashes of the Second World War, refined through the Cold War and triumphantly declared universal after 1991, is fracturing. In its...

Our societies need affordable housing, which is a human right. The prophetic role of religious communities need not conflict with pragmatic engagement. Churches can work within existing systems to achieve incremental progress while continuing to articulate a vision of justice that transcends current arrangements. The point is to house people.

Our societies need affordable housing, which is a human right. The prophetic role of religious communities need not conflict with pragmatic engagement. Churches can work within existing systems to achieve incremental progress while continuing to articulate a vision of justice that transcends current arrangements. The point is to house people.

There’s a hum beneath everything. You’ve grown so accustomed to it that you no longer hear it, the way a person living near a highway eventually stops noticing the traffic. It’s the sound of perpetual connection: the buzz of notifications, the soft glow of screens in...

These have been heavy days in Australia. Our Jewish neighbours are mourning the loss of loved ones and wondering if they’re safe. Our Muslim neighbours grieve alongside them while bracing for the suspicion and hostility that so often follows. And all of us, whatever...

I remember, as a boy, the magic of Christmas morning: waking before dawn, creeping down the hallway, heart pounding with anticipation at what waited beneath the tree. The lights, the tinsel, the smell of my mother’s cooking, the rustling of wrapping paper: it all...

Something unprecedented is happening, and the church is largely silent. Not silent in the way we’re sometimes silent before mystery, that pregnant, worshipful hush that precedes genuine encounter with the Holy. No, this is a different kind of silence. It’s the silence...

“We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, ‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ and I accept it. I’ve got nothing that I hadn’t bargained for. Of course, it’s different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality,...

    There’s a tragedy unfolding in many corners of the church today. It isn’t loud enough to make headlines. It doesn’t announce itself with scandal or collapse. Instead, it moves like a subtle fog through sanctuaries and institutions, soft enough that few notice the...

  There are wounds that span generations. Wounds carried not merely in flesh but in memory, in longing, in the very landscape of a people’s story. For Palestinians (Christian and Muslim alike) these wounds have become a defining mark of existence: dispossession,...

  Christians throughout the centuries have used the word “cruciform” (literally “cross-shaped”) to describe a life patterned after Jesus’s self-giving love. A cruciform faith is one shaped by the self-giving love of Jesus revealed on the cross. It embodies a way of...