11 Nov: Victoria's hate speech laws will be drastically expanded beyond race and religion to protect the LGBTQIA+ community and people with a disability — and the threshold for police to bring criminal charges will be significantly lowered. The proposed changes to the Racial and Religious Tolerance Act will have to walk a tightrope between individual rights, free speech and religious belief but have been welcomed by some religious and community groups. Read the full article

10 Nov: Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has praised faith leaders for working to successfully “push back” against a proposal to remove tax deductibility for school building funds – a mechanism that delivers further public subsidisation of mostly religious and wealthy private schools. In a speech to the Christian Prayer Breakfast in Canberra last week, Mr Dutton said faith leaders had provided the Coalition with “guidance” in countering “weighty issues” such as religious discrimination and school building funds. Read the full article

9 Nov: Key senators are blockading a divisive government plan to crack down on lies in major public debates, threatening to vote down the bill and adding to a logjam of more than 20 bills stalled in the Senate. The new warnings put the contentious plan on a path to defeat unless the government convinces at least three independent senators to set aside their concerns about giving a federal agency sweeping power to oversee content safeguards on social media. Read the full article

7 Nov: A 16-year-old girl tragically took her life in Iran after she was threatened with expulsion by her school after she was recorded dancing without a hijab. An image of Arezoo Khavari's final moments has been circulating on X, with several social media users condemning Iran's strict dress code laws. Read the full article

Opinion / Analysis

Clare Heath-McIvor: As ‘ex-vangelicals’ around the world deconstruct the faith of their formative years, one topic repeatedly comes up – that of white GOP Jesus. It’s the image of the Christian deity remade from a Middle Eastern refugee who railed against religion, politics and capitalism to a white American capitalist religio-political figure mandating the Christian pursuit of power and dominion. Read the full article

Barbara Panelli: Recently, I participated in a Victorian Department of Health survey. The phone interviewer was keen to zap through questions, not reflect on them.  After I had commented on a couple, I recognised he simply wanted or needed to get to the end. So I didn't comment when family violence was defined as being, among other things, preventing a person from practising their religion. Read the full article

Anna Noonan: Last Friday, amid the backwash of Donald Trump’s re-election, Orange Hospital made national headlines for banning abortion – an executive decision made earlier this year that blindsided the community and clinicians, sparking instant criticism and public outrage. By the same afternoon, NSW Health Minister Ryan Park had publicly instructed the hospital to reinstate the service immediately. Read the full article

Zouhir Gabsi: The appointment of the “special envoy” to combat Islamophobia in Australia has sparked a wave of controversy. The identity of the envoy, British-born Muslim Aftab Malik, was revealed almost three months after Jillan Segal’s appointment as an envoy to combat antisemitism. Read the full article

Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz and Matthew B Jané: As governments worldwide move to restrict teenagers’ access to smartphones and social media, a fierce scientific debate has erupted over whether these digital technologies actually harm young people’s mental health. The controversy, sparked by an influential recent book blaming phones for rising youth anxiety, has exposed deep uncertainties in the research evidence. Read the full article

Many anti-abortion advocates use religion as their guiding moral force, but when is it okay for religion to influence law and policy? And how much can Australian anti-abortion attitudes be put down to American influence? Listen to the episode

Bill Wyman: I grew up in red America. Good people, good people, as we are always dutifully required to say. But with a dark side. They sulked after the Civil War and they sulked some more during the decades of Democratic dominance after the Great Depression. Then, they seethed over the implicit rebuke that came with the passage of major civil rights reforms in the 1950s and ’60s. Read the full article

Kiera Butler: Over the last few months leading up to the election, I’ve been writing about an ascendant fundamentalist religious movement whose leaders believe that the United States is a Christian nation, that the Constitution is based on the Bible, and that Christians are called to take over the government. Read the full article

Eliana Silver: This past summer, the internet erupted over an article about influencer Hannah Neeleman, better known as @ballerinafarm to her 19 million followers. Journalist Megan Agnew spent time with Hannah and her family on their Utah farm, examining her ‘tradwife’ lifestyle. The article implied that Hannah, having had eight children, giving up her dream of being a dancer, and focusing on homemaking, was an example of how religion is pushing women back centuries. Read the full article

Joe De Bruyn: The Church in Australia has a very fundamental problem which really starts with the fact that for decades now, we have not taught the Catholic faith in its fulness in our primary and secondary Catholic schools. As a result of that, when the students reach Year 12 and they go into work or further studies at university, probably 95% of them are not practising Catholics. They don’t believe the Faith and that shows that the Catholic education system in this country is a total failure. Read the full article

Harmeet Kaur: Jason Callahan spends much of his days at the bedsides of people nearing the end of life. A chaplain in the palliative care unit of a hospital cancer center, Callahan supports patients and their loved ones as they confront some of life’s most challenging crises… In these conversations with patients who are wary of religion, Callahan slips in another detail: he’s an atheist himself. Read the full article

Nikki Gemmell: Organised religion is a man-made construct, of course, not woman-made. Yet how comfortably does this sit with the young females of today, roaring up strong, in this post #MeToo existence? There are no successful, widespread woman-made religions, which would look very different indeed. And a new dynamic – of aware, questioning young females – is having profound repercussions for the Church, and Christianity in general. Read the full article

More than a century ago, the 1911 Parliament Act restricted the House of Lords’ powers under threat of a flood of Liberal appointees. The act boldly declared that “it is intended to substitute for the House of Lords as it at present exists a Second Chamber constituted on a popular instead of hereditary basis, but such substitution cannot be immediately brought into operation”. This “temporary” measure has become a historic understatement, frustrating those who seek reform – including this newspaper. Read the full article

Miles Pattenden: Justin Welby’s decision this week to resign as Archbishop of Canterbury was as sad as it was inevitable. The Archbishop was found to have sat on accusations of abuse raised against John Smyth (1941–2018), a barrister and evangelical Christian involved in ministry for children. Read the full article