Religion News Australia

July 11 – 18, 2021

Religion news stories from Australia

(Research: Greg Spearritt)

 

ABUSE

Priest convicted of 26 counts of abusing students at Southern Highlands school (Sydney Morning Herald)
July 15 – A Catholic priest has been handcuffed and led from a Sydney court after he was convicted of abusing twelve boys at a boarding school in the NSW Southern Highlands in the 1980s.

INTERNATIONAL STORIES
Judaism

Golda Meir, Israel’s ‘Iron Lady’, left behind a complex legacy (ABC News)
July 17 – Golda Meir was the fourth prime minister of Israel and the first woman to hold that position.

Religious Violence

US prepares to evacuate ‘courageous’ Afghan allies, Taliban gains ground (Brisbane Times)
July 15 – Washington: The Biden administration said that it is prepared to begin evacuation flights for Afghan interpreters and translators who aided the US military effort in the nearly 20-year war.

Other

Mystery deepens how mission from God became a political assassination (Brisbane Times)
July 13 – Port-Au-Prince: The arrest of a failed Haitian businessman living in Florida who authorities say was a key player in the killing of Haiti’s President deepened the mystery into an already convoluted plot surrounding the assassination.

‘It’s mine, it’s mine’: How do you find a Dalai Lama? (Sydney Morning Herald)
July 15 – He’s been at the helm of Tibetan Buddhism for eight decades.

Narendra Modi stokes tensions with ban on animal sacrifice in Kashmir (Sydney Morning Herald)
July 17 – Delhi: India has ordered a crackdown on the religious sacrifice of animals in Kashmir, appearing to invite tensions in the majority-Muslim region days before one of Islam’s biggest holidays.

RELIGION & SOCIETY

Census time to mark ‘No Religion’ (Sydney Morning Herald)
July 15 – (Opinion: Dr Heidi Nicholl) Australians are about to sit down to the five-yearly self-analysis that is the census.

Mother who believed ‘hand of God’ would heal her daughter jailed for endangering child’s life (ABC News)
July 16 – A Toowoomba mother who relied on the “hand of God” to heal her sick daughter has been jailed for endangering the six-year-old girl’s life.

Unlike some adults, kids don’t use past good deeds to justify bad ones (Brisbane Times)
July 16 – A new study suggests young children do not use their past good behaviour to justify current bad behaviour like many adults do

Hilda Scott says living in silence ‘removes the filters we put on life’ (ABC News)
July 17 – On top of a small mountain in the middle of lush rainforest, there’s a simple brick building.

Meet the humanists: ‘You don’t have to be Christian to think of yourself as a good person’ (The Guardian, Australia)
July 18 – When Heidi Nicholl moved to Australia five years ago, she remembers thinking: “Where is it – where is humanism?”

Courage of convictions in the face of hatred a beacon of faith (Sydney Morning Herald)
July 18 – (Opinion: Barney Zwartz) It is often suggested that courage is the foundational virtue because without it the other virtues can hardly get started.