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27 Sep: At least 46 people have drowned in flooded rivers during a three-day religious festival in eastern India. Thirty-seven of those were children and six were women, according to the Bihar State Government. They died while taking holy baths in rivers across several districts for the Jivitputrika festival, in which women fast for the wellbeing of their children Read the full article

26 Sep: A large crowd gathered at the steps of South Australia’s Parliament House yesterday for a rally in support of a controversial bill to ban later-term abortions. The steps were lined with individual numbers from one to 45 and a small teddy bear in front of each number to represent the 45 late-term pregnancies that were terminated after 23 weeks since July 2022. Read the full article

26 Sep: The Coalition says Labor’s rejigged misinformation bill will “have a chilling effect on political speech”, saying the legislation states the laws will apply to “information about electoral candidates or referendum proposals”. Opposition communications spokesman David Coleman, who last week accused Labor of seeking to “ram its legislation through” by the end of the year, said the areas of public speech and information sharing that would be captured by the bill were “extremely broad”. Read the full article

25 Sep: A new bill that would require South Australians seeking an abortion from 28 weeks to give birth has been denounced as tantamount to “forced birth” by the Greens, while the lead standards body in women’s health called it an attempt to limit healthcare access. The bill was introduced into state parliament on Wednesday by Liberal frontbencher Ben Hood, though it is not Liberal policy and is unlikely to pass both houses to become law. Read the full article

25 Sep: Survivors and community organisations have welcomed the passing of a law banning LGBTQA+ conversion practices in South Australia.The SA government bill passed 13 votes to 8 on Tuesday night. “This new law confirms we are not broken, disordered or in need of fixing,” Equality Australia CEO Anna Brown said. Read the full article

24 Sep: The Australian government has spent almost $100,000 on ferrying Pope Francis around Papua New Guinea to attend religious services earlier this month. In the letter to the Rationalist Society of Australia, Air Marshal Robert Chipman, Vice Chief of the Defence Force, revealed that the Defence Force’s support for flying Pope Francis from Port Moresby to Vanimo in a C-130J Hercules cost $98,420. Read the full article

24 Sep: A powerful fringe Christian movement behind the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol attacks believes former President Donald Trump will help them take over the world, a theologian reveals in his soon-to-be published book. Dr. Matthew Taylor says the New Apostolic Reformation is a group even evangelicals find extreme. Read the full article

23 Sep: A rare coalition of heavyweight Labor and Liberal advisers has been formed to protect Catholic education funding in the run-up to the next multi-billion dollar national funding agreement. Former federal Liberal director Brian Loughnane has joined the board of the Victorian Catholic Education Authority alongside its chairman James Merlino, the former Victorian Labor deputy premier. Read the full article

21 Sep: An LNP candidate has withdrawn her support for a rabbi who has repeatedly compared homosexuality to paedophilia, bestiality, and incest. Amanda Stoker had agreed to host a book launch for ultra-orthodox rabbi Shimon Cowen in Queensland Parliament House on Monday. The LNP's candidate for Oodgeroo at next month's state election claimed she was unaware of Dr Cowen's anti-homosexual views when she agreed to promote his book. Read the full article

17 Sep: When Jillian Segal AO took up the anti-Semitism envoy role in July this year, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese labelled the appointment a "critical step" on the way to easing the tensions playing out in Australia as a result of the war in Gaza.  But more than two months on, the promised Islamophobia equivalent hasn't been appointed, leading to concern within some influential parts of the Islamic community. Read the full article

Opinion / Analysis

Luke McNamara: When media reports emerged earlier this year about a new youth “crime wave” of robbery, break and enter, and car theft in the northwestern NSW town of Moree, it wasn’t hard to predict what would happen next – and what the government would do about it. A new criminal law (or two) would be created, conveying a “tough on crime” message. Voices of opposition would warn about the adverse implications for human rights. These warnings would be ignored, deflected or minimised. Read the full article

Ned Curthoys: Arendt is sometimes thought of as a lofty and abstract thinker. Yet her thinking was highly responsive to the shock of Nazism and the rise of fascism, which left her stateless and acutely vulnerable for many years. After World War II, she discarded any ready-made theories. These included comfortable notions that Nazism and Stalinism were aberrations from the eventual global triumph of Western democracy. Read the full article

Rita Nasr: While abortion is currently legal in Australia, proposed changes could impact accessibility and regulations. These are laws that women have fought and advocated a lifetime for. Women have a right to autonomy over decisions that affect their own bodies. The proposed winding back of abortion rights is just the beginning in Australia and we should all be concerned. Read the full article

Van Badham: To bring its suite of laws into line with community attitudes was precisely why South Australia reformed its own abortion laws in 2021. Hood’s issue is with South Australia’s legal provisions around “late-term abortions”, performed in the third trimester of pregnancy. They amount to barely 1% of all pregnancy terminations and are performed almost exclusively for dire medical reasons. Read the full article

The law has just changed in Queensland with the state fully decriminalising sex work, following the lead of New South Wales, Victoria, and the Northern Territory. However, sex work remains hotly debated, with some feminist groups raising questions of bodily autonomy, and some religious critics concerned with the purity and sanctity of the act of sex itself. Listen to the episode

Nilay Saiya: In both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, Donald Trump captured the vast majority of the American evangelical vote. He will likely do so again in this year’s presidential election. Although evangelical support for Trump is motivated by a number of issues, chief among them is the sanctity of human life. Indeed, some evangelical leaders have touted Trump as being America’s “most pro-life president”. But this view is incorrect. Trump is anything but pro-life. Read the full article

Salma Niazi: The Taliban’s latest decree banning women’s voices in public might have shocked the world, but for Afghan women this is nothing new. Over the past three years, the Taliban have waged a relentless campaign to erase women from public life in Afghanistan. From banning girls from schools to barring women from most forms of employment, the Taliban have systematically stripped away our rights, our freedoms, and now even our voices. Read the full article

]Khadija Khan: Afghan women are no longer allowed to speak in public. Reading aloud and singing are strictly prohibited. Women are not allowed to gaze upon men to whom they are not related or married. They are forced to cover themselves from head to toe. It is disgraceful and absurd, however, that so many commentators are shocked by the Taliban’s latest decrees—as if the imposition of such draconian laws based on religious misogyny was somehow impossible to anticipate. Read the full article

Nathan Beacom: Are all religions equal? Pope Francis created a stir with some off-the-cuff comments to an interreligious group of young people in Singapore, during his recent trip to Asia. “All religions are paths to God,” he said. “I will use an analogy, they are like different languages that express the divine.” As so often happens, a snippet from some impromptu remarks made it onto social media and many read it in a negative light, as though the pope were saying that all religions are equally true. Read the full article