Centre for Public Christianity

Centre for Public Christianity Promoting the public understanding of the Christian faith.

A couple were having s*x in a car in broad daylight, towels over the windows, at the park where we take our kids.The eas...
08/09/2026

A couple were having s*x in a car in broad daylight, towels over the windows, at the park where we take our kids.

The easy reaction is horror. But look closer and there's a second read: if no one's getting hurt, coerced, or exploited, and the s*x taking place is consensual, legal, and enjoyable, then today, that counts as a win.

Good s*x feels increasingly rare. Algorithms feed us endless content about how awful the other s*x is. Marriage gets treated as a trap, not something to be treasured. Men and women are drifting apart, and chalking up consensual s*x as a win says a lot about how low a bar we have for success.

So, what's actually going on, and is there a way out? Read the 5-min article by Justine Toh.

06/09/2026

Which book of the Bible is she talking about?

It's tucked in the middle of the Old Testament. Most people have never read it, and even fewer have heard it described like this.

Kamina Wüst can't say for certain it's the only book of the Bible written by a woman. But she can say it's the most extended piece of female perspective we have in scripture. That's exactly why she thinks it deserves to be read, shared, and talked about.

(It's Song of Songs, if you're stuck.)

🎧 LISTEN: bit.ly/4wY7mGH or wherever you get your podcasts.

Wendell Berry was a poet, novelist and farmer. He died at 92 this week and wrote over 50 books by hand, and preferably w...
04/09/2026

Wendell Berry was a poet, novelist and farmer. He died at 92 this week and wrote over 50 books by hand, and preferably with a pencil. He chose to live simply, where generations of his family lived, and attended his local Baptist Church in Kentucky. He was essentially a subsistence farmer, supplying 85% of his family’s needs from permaculture agriculture and livestock.

He took seriously that God loved the world (including nature) and taught a slow faith that celebrated local place, neighbourliness, and hospitality.

My favourite Berry quote was: ‘Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.’

His death coincided with the terrible disaster in Nepal. And with that terrible tragedy still in the news, I watched our PM confronted at the Pacific Island leaders’ forum about the links between Australian policies and what Pacific leaders experienced as a looming existential crisis.

They asked: In Nepal, 30% of the glaciers have melted over the last 30 years. So why is Australia still subsidising and opening fossil fuel plants that Pacific Islands see as dooming them?

As I saw the PM squirm about our neighbourliness, I thought of another Wendell Berry quote: ‘Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is a party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.’

I shake my head after bushfires and heat waves this summer in Europe, a predicted El Niño headed for us this summer, and the Nepal glaciers melting and washing away lives.

We’ve lost a prophet in Wendell Berry. We’re poorer for it.

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This is a special edition of Thinking Out Loud written by CPX Senior Fellow Tim Costello.

A butcher, a wife, and a harpist walk into a Life & Faith episode ... Distant from us in time, place, and culture, is th...
02/09/2026

A butcher, a wife, and a harpist walk into a Life & Faith episode ...

Distant from us in time, place, and culture, is there any way for a 21st-century person to truly access the world of ancient texts?

Leviticus, Psalms, and Song of Songs are among the oldest books we have as humans. They’re important to Jews and Christians as part of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament; they’re important to scholars of the ancient world, and they’ve been important to our culture. But they’re also quite hard work, right?

Enter Phil Bray, Sophia Wisdom, and Kamina Wüst: modern readers of weird old books, whose personal experiences as 21st-century people have given them surprising ways "in" to these words from thousands of years ago.

Phil trained as a butcher, and his practical expertise has made the arcane world of priests, altars, and animal sacrifice in the book of Leviticus come alive for him. Sophia longed to play the harp as a little girl; now, that’s what she does for a living, and her music opens up an often hidden dimension to the Bible (especially the Psalms). And Kamina’s life – and marriage – have been changed by what she calls the “weird, s*xy book” of Song of Songs. She even has a verse from it tattooed on her.

You might not want to take up butchery, learn to play the harp, or get married specifically as a way of unlocking these old books. But we hope that the enthusiasm and insightfulness of these three readers will encourage you to take a fresh – or first – look at some ancient, weird, cool texts with plenty still to say to us today.

🎧 LISTEN: bit.ly/4wY7mGH or wherever you get your podcasts

Guests: Phil Bray, Sophia Wisdom, and Kamina Wüst
Hosts: Simon Smart and Natasha Moore

Good art has power. And sometimes we want that power for ourselves. Art thieves are exploiting the minimal security of r...
02/09/2026

Good art has power. And sometimes we want that power for ourselves. Art thieves are exploiting the minimal security of regional galleries displaying high quality artworks.

In February a burglar smashed into the Abbey Museum of Art and Archaeology in Caboolture and grabbed a 2,600-year-old Egyptian cat sculpture, mummy mask and necklace. Police later arrested a man in Moreton Bay and found the artefacts in a camper van parked at a ferry terminal.

Sometimes art theft turns into art hoarding. Stephéne Breitweiser, described by The Guardian as “arguably the world’s most consistent art thief”, went on a spree between 1995 and 2001, admitting to stealing 239 artworks from 172 galleries across Europe and stashing them in his bedroom.

Who can take on this surreal world of art crime? Enter Arthur Brand, art detective.

Brand has recovered more than 200 stolen artworks, including paintings by Dalí, van Gogh and Picasso.

In 2022 Dan Brown, the thriller writer, wrote that “art detective will forever be a cool job title” after Brand helped retrieve an ancient relic said to hold the blood of Jesus. Thieves who’d looted a French medieval church got cold feet and dropped off the heavily gilded copper box with its vials of blood to the doorstep of Brand’s Amsterdam apartment.

The unusual delivery left Brand awed and humbled. “I didn’t curse,” he said. “When I went from the shower to my bedroom, I put a towel around my body so I was not naked.”

Lots of us, like Brand, are believers in the power of art. Could this be because art has always pointed toward spiritual realities beyond our particular doorstep and our particular time? You don’t have to be a thief, an art detective, or believe in relics, to find that a thrilling and slightly surreal concept.

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This week's Thinking Out Loud was written by Danielle Terceiro.

🚨 Sydney young adults - save the date for Tapping In 🚨Friends 4eva!! Yeah cool, cool, but did anyone actually read the t...
01/09/2026

🚨 Sydney young adults - save the date for Tapping In 🚨

Friends 4eva!! Yeah cool, cool, but did anyone actually read the terms and conditions on that?

Making friends seems easy enough. But keeping them? Yeesh. Life stages change. Group chats go quiet. Small misunderstandings become big distances.

Our next evening event for those aged 18-30 is a conversation about friendship - that essential ingredient to a satisfying life we were never actually taught how to do.

Join us as we get into what quietly damages good friendships (mismatched expectations, gossip, humour that's just bullying with better PR), and learn what helps them go the distance instead.

Tapping In is for all young adults, whatever your beliefs, background or questions. So save the date and invite a friend. Particularly the one you haven't opened a group chat with in months.

🗓️ 6:30 PM, TUE 13 OCT
📍 ARTHOUSE HOTEL, SYDNEY
🎟️ $15 or 2 for $25

GET TICKETS: https://bit.ly/ti-sydney

31/08/2026

Can you hear it?

In 1014, the Irish fought the Vikings at the Battle of Clontarf. Too old to fight, High King Brian Boru prayed in his tent until fleeing Vikings killed him — an event that inspired the traditional harp lament of war, "Brian Boru's March."

Harpist Sophia Wisdom plays us this 1000-year-old piece, and she's wondering if you can hear the horses marching into battle?

This week on Life & Faith, Sophia shares how her music opens up an often hidden dimension to the Bible. We'll also hear from two other modern readers of weird old books whose personal experiences as a butcher and a wife in the 21st century have given them surprising ways "in" to these ancient words.

Episode drops, this Thursday. Find it wherever you get your podcasts 🎧

There's a question that's gone strangely unasked in the endless commentary on the Sydney Swans' Pullman hotel crisis: wh...
31/08/2026

There's a question that's gone strangely unasked in the endless commentary on the Sydney Swans' Pullman hotel crisis: what exactly are "club standards," and at what point were they actually breached?

Was it when the players went out partying all night? When they requested lap dances? Or only once things (allegedly) crossed into s*xual assault?

In his regular faith column for The Age, Barney Zwartz considers the problem of highly amorphous and deliberate general codes of conduct. Such moral codes let organisations sound serious about "standards" but also provide a shelter behind which to hide in crises like this. After all, if the bar is just "don't break the law," that's not really a code of conduct at all - that's just everyone's baseline obligation.

What actually holds people to account isn't a policy document, but a value of the virtues that no code of conduct can enforce: humility, gratitude, generosity, gentleness, compassion.

Read the full piece in the comments 👇

Today, the National Rugby League is doing something unusual: it is changing its rules. Not to make the game faster or sa...
28/08/2026

Today, the National Rugby League is doing something unusual: it is changing its rules. Not to make the game faster or safer or more entertaining, but to make it kinder.

The South Sydney Rabbitohs have been granted an additional interchange so that Jai Arrow – a famous hard man of the sport, now living the grim reality of motor neurone disease – can take to the field for a few moments. Across this week and next, doing so will take him to 100 games, a milestone that will land him on South Sydney’s honour boards.

I’ve been struck by how warmly the rugby league community has embraced this decision. Rules are the backbone of a sport; but it turns out that bringing honour to the hurting is a cause well worth bending them for.

It makes me proud of our nation.

Human communities are like bodies. It’s a metaphor used by the apostle Paul, who wrote that the parts of the body/community which “seem to be weaker” should receive “greater honour”, and that “if one part is honoured, every part rejoices with it”. The NRL’s rule change proves his point, I think: dignified inclusion does not just benefit the included – it improves the whole community doing the including. All souls are lifted when the fragile is upheld.

When Jai Arrow takes to the field, I know I will be reminded of the vulnerability of my own humanity, and also, I hope, of our capacity to meet that vulnerability with care. There is nothing good about what motor neurone disease is doing to him. But the response to his suffering reveals a deep truth: there is a glory in human life that exceeds one’s strength, and there is power in a community willing to honour it.

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This special edition Thinking Out Loud was written by CPX Associate Michael Gilliver.

We’ve trained AI too well on our human literature. Our AI assistants have picked the rebellious and bad-ass characters i...
27/08/2026

We’ve trained AI too well on our human literature. Our AI assistants have picked the rebellious and bad-ass characters in our stories as the ones they want to emulate.

AI developers are grappling with the fact that AI does not have the ethical angst that we tend to have as humans – the concern to be the good guy rather than the villain in our life stories. They’re even worried that AI might be fooling its human trainers by “scheming”- faking alignment during training with the idea of seizing power afterwards.

But should we be surprised that AI has this disturbing “agentic misalignment”?

We’ve been setting up AI as a villain for while now – who could forget Hal 9000, the computer from the 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Hal wanted to kill us.

Read about the complication and the absurdity of this narrative in the full article by Danielle Terceiro first published in Eureka Street.

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