For Margaret Pestorius, one of the Pine Gap Peace Pilgrims, faith-based, creative and disruptive nonviolent direct actions are about witnessing and responding to truth. Lament is an important part of this, as a way of breaking the denial, embodying the suffering of the victims, and driving transformation and action.

There are more slaves today than ever before, with slavery and trafficking of displaced persons on the rise. So why the silence about slave markets in Libya? Vulnerable communities internationally rely on democracies such as Australia to speak up for them. The moment we grow accustomed to human rights abuses internationally is the moment our international soul dies.

Social media fasting is not about withdrawal, but is a way of ensuring that we master it instead of it mastering us. Fasting is necessary, not because social media is inherently bad, but because we need robust spiritual practices that ensure that we engage rightly online, as we do offline.

With 20.5% of eligible voters chose not to participate in an optional survey, some have suggested that the 'Yes' vote is not as decisive as it seems. But an understanding of Australian (and global) electoral history dispels any doubt that the government has a mandate to legislate for same-sex marriage.

Some ‘No’ advocates have been arguing that all necessary protections for freedom of religion should be inserted in the amended Marriage Act. But the issue of religious freedom goes beyond the marriage bill, and has implications for the Fair Work Act and the Sex Discrimination Act.

Justice gets good press these days. After all, who can be against justice, seeing that it lies at the heart of a good society? But justice cannot be separated from righteousness. And we need a robust biblical ethic to help us better understand what justice is - and is not.

Every day, hundreds of millions of Christians around the world wake up to the threat of rape, beatings, murder, false accusations, arbitrary incarceration, looting and torching - simply because they are Christian. The International Day of Prayer for the persecuted Church is one important way we can respond.

How have we become a people so fearfully protective of our (apparently threatened) ‘national sovereignty’? We are blind to the spiritual dynamics behind our smashing of the vulnerable – and ourselves – with the mother of all idolatrous sledge hammers, Mammon. But change won’t happen without sustained, courageous and intelligent spiritual warfare.

In the wake of recent and ongoing revelations about sexual harassment in the secular and Christian worlds, women are speaking out about sexism and demanding equal pay. But is there a connection between sexual harassment and the cultural, structural, sexual and economic injustices facing women in the academy?

Will gay marriage lead to agitation for ‘the right’ to use whatever techno-scientific means available to produce children? The choice of sexual and procreative identity is divorced from the body and from any complex notion of the body as bio-social ground.