As Sydney Synod continues to hold the biblical line when so much of Australia and the rest of the Communion is capitulating, let’s hope that the future headlines can proclaim the same message: The laity saved Sydney from decline.

In the last hectic weeks before Synod, it has been revealed that a motion will seek to introduce a further debate on the introduction of women to the priesthood by promoting a General Synod Canon that has been twice rejected by Sydney Synod.

An aversion to sunlight, a sickly childhood and a failed engagement: Kierkegaard knew all about anxiety, writes PETER BOLT.

Four hundred and fifty years ago this year, Thomas Cranmer, the 67-year-old Archbishop of Canterbury, was taken through the north gate of the city of Oxford, tied to a pile of wood and burnt to death. It was one of those moments of horror for which that violent period is well known.

The move to establish a training college for clergy was borne out of intense pressure to find ministers for the vast territory of the new colony. PETER BOLT investigates the struggle to get Moore College off the ground.

In recent days there seems to be a rising tide of opinion, perhaps whipped into a strong surf by the Australian media, that ‘Church’ and ‘State’ need to be kept separate. The ‘Left’ have been alarmed at yet another conservative victory in the recent federal election, which was aided and abetted, apparently, by ‘the Religious Right’ rearing its head in Australian politics. Perhaps with the Hollingworth debacle fresh in mind, the public seem ready to be persuaded. In a move uncharacteristic of the ‘Left’, a leaf is pulled from the history of the US of A, and the call is becoming increasingly shrill that ‘the Church’ should keep out of ‘the State’, as, it seems to be assumed, has been the case previously.

The belief in the resurrection of Jesus is by no means peripheral to Christianity; it is at its core. But, as the saying goes, familiarity often breeds contempt. Are we really saying that a man rose from the grave, i.e. that a dead man, a corpse, came out of the grave? And, if we are saying that, what does that event really mean? It may be amazing, and it certainly is unique, but does it have any real cash-value for life at the end of the twenty-first century?

In many ways, Australian society still lives on the capital of its Christian past, and we should thank God for that. But there are also clear signs that secularism is advancing and also that explicitly anti-Christian forces are at work in some quarters. This is not paranoia, it is simply observation. But is this cause for depression or despair? Is it cause for the Christian churches to begin a campaign of denouncing the evil in the midst of our land?