Soul Search

In our cultural moment, the relationship between religion and sexuality is fraught for a lot of people. In public and political discourse, even the terms religion and sexuality suggest conflict, pain and difficulty. But is that the end of the road? Well not always, in lived experience.

Karl Hand is a community support worker, and the pastor of Crave MCC in Sydney – a congregation affiliated with perhaps the oldest international network of queer-affirming Christian churches.

AJ Jensen is cofounder of Queers Be With You, which helps Churches and Christian organisations to be more LGBTIQ inclusive.

It has to be said a lot of our public conversation about religion and sexuality assumes that faith and queerness are separate – even antagonistic aspects of human life. But where does that leave queer people of faith? Queer theology has been an active field of study for decades, but may not be well known outside divinity schools, and is only just now being taught formally in Australia.

Rev Penny Jones is an Anglican priest and currently serves at Pitt Street Uniting Church in Sydney. Together with her wife Josephine, they ran the first tertiary unit on queer theology in Australia at the University of Divinity.

Rev Dr Josephine Inkpin is an Anglican priest and minister at Pitt Street Uniting Church in Sydney. Together with her wife Penny, they ran the first tertiary unit on queer theology in Australia at the University of Divinity.

Dr Peter Kline is Academic Dean at St Francis Anglican college in Meanjin, Brisbane, where he teaches Contemporary Theology in a Global Context.

Benjamin Oh is co-Chair of Equal Voices, an alliance of LGBTIQA+ Christians and allies in Australia. He is also the convenor of the Queer Christian Roundtable for Sydney World Pride and Convenor of the GLBTIQA+ Interfaith & Intercultural Network (GIIN).

Further links:

• Sydney World Pride 2023
• World Pride Faith

Looking at the stars and imagining what’s out there – and our own place in it as humans – is a theme that’s preoccupied our species across time, across cultures, and across religious traditions.

Dr Mehmet Ozalp is director of the Centre for Islamic Studies and Civilisation at Charles Sturt University.

Dr Jennifer Wiseman is an astrophysicist who studies the process of star and planet formation in our own galaxy using radio, optical and infrared telescopes. She is also past director of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion.

Why is rest such a challenge in our culture, in our time? Tricia Hersey has made it her life’s work to advocate for rest – developing a rest practice herself, and guiding others in the same direction.

Tricia’s work isn’t about self-care or individual wellness, and there’s no neat hack for recalibrating your work/life balance. Instead, she advocates for a radical, countercultural form of rest grounded in a theology of Black liberation.

Tricia Hersey is a performance artist, community organiser and founder of The Nap Ministry – an organisation devoted to the liberating power of rest. Her book is Rest is Resistance: Free yourself from grind culture and reclaim your life.

The Mabo decision was a legal and cultural milestone in Australia, but thirty years on, how has it changed theology? For decades Dr Anne Pattel-Gray has been calling for racial justice in and through Christian churches. She says Mabo “shifts our whole perspective of how we interpret the Bible, of how we do theology.”

Aunty Dr Anne Pattel-Gray is a Bidjara activist and theologian who has been a key figure in the movement to decolonise Australian theology for decades. She is the author of The Great White Flood, which has become a landmark text in religious studies, and was recently appointed Professor of Indigenous Studies at the University of Divinity in Melbourne.

Rev Mark Kickett is interim National Chair of the Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress.

Have you ever found yourself in a place where heaven and earth seem to meet? Sacred architecture and aesthetics can make a person experience the numinous, even in a building not set aside for a religious purpose. Also, Papua New Guinea’s Baha’i community, are about to open a new house of worship in Port Moresby.

Watch The Architect and the Mosque on Compass.

Read Ayla Lepine’s article about sacred architecture on The Architectural Review.

Ayla Lepine is the author of Gothic Legacies: Four Centuries of Tradition and Innovation in Art and Architecture and Modern Architecture and Religious Communities, 1850–1970.

Rev Dr Ayla Lepine is an art historian and Ahmanson Fellow in Art and Religion at the National Gallery in London.

Zha Agabe-Granfar and Saeed Granfar are part of the Baha’i community in Papua New Guinea. Saeed is the consulting architect of the new Baha’i temple in Port Moresby.

What does it take to re-green a desert? As it turns out, sometimes what you need is already in the ground right under your feet. Tony Rinaudo went to Niger as an agriculturalist and missionary and – almost by accident – began a regeneration practice now used across the world. Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration, or FMNR, cultivates the shoots of tree stumps that remain after land clearing.

Tony Rinaudo is an agronomist originally from Myrtleford in Victoria who developed Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR) while on mission in Niger in the early 1980s. He is now the Principal Climate Action Advisor with World Vision Australia.

Ruth Jerotich is a farmer in the Baringo region of Kenya. She began practicing Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration on her family’s land five years ago and has become an FMNR ambassador in her community.

an literature somehow bridge the visible and invisible realms? Meredith Lake speaks with Egyptian-American poet and aphorist Yahia Lababidi, whose work ranges across cultures, traditions and genres.

Find Yahia Lababidi’s books here

Listen to the Philosophy in a Nutshell series on The Philosopher’s Zone with David Rutledge

Guests

Yahia Lababidi is a writer, poet and aphorist. Originally from Cairo, in Egypt, he now lives in Florida, US. His latest book of poetry is Learning to Pray.

The South Pacific – the liquid continent – is one of the most religious places on earth. The overwhelming majority of people identify as Christians of one kind or another – so what does that mean at Christmas?

Rev James Bhagwan is an ordained minister in the Methodist church of Fiji, and since 2018, General Secretary of the Pacific Conference of Churches. The PCC is the peak ecumenical body in the Pacific - representing more than 40 different churches and national church councils, from across 19 different Pacific states and territories.

Maria Komboy is a descendant of the Biak people of West Papua. She is a theologian and human rights advocate based in Jayapura, where she works in church and civil spaces to educate others about the basic rights of her people, and to advocate for peace and justice.

For more on this topic, listen to God Forbid: Heaven on Earth: Religion in the Pacific.

As people around the world prepare to celebrate Christmas, Christians turn to the Gospels to read ancient accounts of Jesus.

The gospel of John is the fourth gospel contained in the New Testament – and in some ways it stands apart from the other three, Matthew, Mark and Luke. From its famous opening words, “In the beginning was the Word”, its enthralled everyone from Origen to Bach to Dostoyevsky. The Gospels continue to inspire creative expressions of faith.

Rev Professor Dorothy Lee is Stewart Research Professor of New Testament at Trinity College. She is co-editor of The Enduring Impact of the Gospel of John along with Bob Derrenbacker and Muriel Porter.

Rev Canon Dr Bob Derrenbacker is Dean of the theological school at Trinity College. He is co-editor of The Enduring Impact of the Gospel of John along with Dorothy Lee and Muriel Porter.

Anne Benjamin is a writer and poet who has spent decades reflecting on Jesus. She’s the author of After all this time: reflections on Jesus.