Polished speakers tend to command attention at Synod, but it was a young, nervous woman with halting English who brought the room to a standstill.

Describing a martial arts film as beautiful may seem either disingenuous or ironic to all but devoted fans. And perhaps if Hero had been a Hollywood product and not a film from Chinese director Zhang Yimou, beauty would be an outrageous term to attribute to it. But this elegant and eloquent drama about sacrifice and heroism is possibly one of the most visually striking film ever made.

Alain de Botton has made a career out of contemplating the dilemmas of everyday life with the aid of philosophy. His The Consolations of Philosophy was a self-help book for people who can’t stand self-help books, taking the agonies of Neitzche and the outpourings of Schopanhauer and applying them to our financial troubles or lack of friends. De Botton does all this with a pleasant and reassuring style not lacking in the self-deprecatory humour that an Anthony Robbins or a Steve Covey couldn’t even begin to understand.

There is a growing desire on the part of leading figures especially in the predominantly evangelical Diocese of Sydney, in particular, to authorise lay presidency, or “lay administration” as they term it, of the Holy Communion. We should actually be grateful to those in the Diocese of Sydney who have raised the question, since it forces all of us to re-examine our inherited tradition. The real opportunity for most of us in this debate is not to fulminate about what we are against but to remind ourselves of what we are for, and to ask how well our teaching and our practice represent truth, charity and the demands of the Gospel, and whether and how we might all need to consider changes.

As with his earlier novel, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, de Bernieres throws the detail of village life against the dramatic backdrop of a world war and its attendant catastrophes. Birds Without Wings takes us to a small village in Anatolia, now Turkey, in the turbulent years leading up to WWI and beyond.

Tim Watson, history teacher at Abbotsleigh on Sydney’s North Shore, has had a very expensive haircut - $4500 to be precise. After about a year of sporting shoulder-length dreadlocks, Tim offered his hair to raise money for the school’s 2004 charity.

Every year Australians send millions of cards to each other. Unsurprisingly, most of us don’t give a second thought to the maker of the card. Not so the men and women of All Saints’, North Epping.

There is no illusion of mere objectivity in Garner’s non-fiction: that of an absent, disinterested observer. Garner is as much a character in the narrative as Anu Singh and Joe Cinque’s mother. And it is the rawness of Garner’s hurt spirit that gives her the ability to record so sensitively the pain, bewilderment and grief of others.

In the world according to Hollywood, philosophy and professional killing go hand in glove. Being in the business of extinguishing life seems to promote thinking on the meaning of it. Our moral guide in Collateral is not Cruise’s killer Vincent but his unwilling accomplice Max (Jamie Foxx). Max is a taxi driver and something of a perfectionist. Vincent has five people to kill that night. He doesn’t know who they are and he doesn’t care. In his philosophy of life, humans are just a speck in a massive and indifferent universe.

While its significance may be lost on modern westerners, the breaking of bread with another person is a significant event with a long history. Our word ‘companion’ means one with whom bread is shared. In ancient cultures – Jewish, Pagan and Christian – sharing a meal and breaking bread was an indication of a cultural connection. It was a form of fellowship.

Drama shows peril of life in moral vacuum: Sarah Barnett reviews Changing Lanes.