Religion News Selection
June 4 – 11, 2023
A selection of religion news stories from Australia
(Research: Greg Spearritt)
ABUSE
Church ‘needs levy to fund sex abuse victims’ (The Australian)
June 10 – A former senior Catholic adviser warns the faith’s financial structures could be broken by the abuse crisis but estimates its Australian profitable economic assets could be as much as $500bn.
Allegations of abuse at centre accused of ‘extreme religious practices’ raised in WA before $4m grant (The Guardian, Australia)
June 11 – Health authorities in Western Australia heard allegations of abuse at the Esther Foundation in 2018 – well before the Morrison government awarded the foundation a $4m grant.
EDUCATION
Private schools are crying poor – but trust me, they can afford a new tax (Sydney Morning Herald)
June 6 – (Opinion: Emma Rowe) We like to think we are very egalitarian in Australia, but this isn’t reflected in our education system.
INTERNATIONAL STORIES
At 12, I was in Auschwitz. My parents and seven siblings were murdered. Here is how I built a life (The Guardian, Australia)
June 6 – Ivor Perl survived the Holocaust, then spent 50 years quietly looking after his family and business in the UK.
Christian Broadcasting Network founder and former presidential candidate Pat Robertson dies at 93 (ABC News)
June 8 – Pat Robertson, a religious broadcaster who turned a tiny Virginia TV station into a global evangelical network, ran for president and helped make religion central to Republican Party politics in America, has died at 93.
RELIGION & SOCIETY
Relationship between religious beliefs, nightmares, and anxiety being probed in new study (ABC News)
June 8 – A group of Australian researchers is investigating whether faith and spirituality influences how people dream, and whether people who are religious are less likely to have nightmares and dreams about death.
After the demise of Hillsong, is there a place for the church in modern Australia? (ABC News)
June 11 – (Opinion: Karen Tong) Only a few years ago, Hillsong — a Pentecostal church planted in the north-western suburbs of Sydney in the 80s — was one of Australia’s biggest and most successful exports.
I left Pentecostalism 17 years ago. Now I’m witnessing others make their own exodus from Hillsong (The Guardian, Australia)
June 11 – (Opinion: Marc Fennell) I reckon I was about 11 or 12 when it dawned on me there were some definite holes in Pentecostal Christian theology – the idea that bad things are the work of Satan, good things the result of hands-on intervention from God himself.
