There's something awfully final about a grave or a tomb. When the tomb of Jesus was sealed with a big round stone, that stone must have seemed like a cosmic full-stop. The party was over. The world is full of what seem like full-stops - situations that...

"The joy of the Gospel fills the hearts and the lives of those who encounter Jesus": with these words, Pope Francis begins his Apostolic Exhortation, The Joy of the Gospel, which I want to be the charter of the Archdiocese of Brisbane as we shape the...

At Christmas, the words of the angel have echoed down through the ages: "Glory to God in the highest heaven and peace on earth to those whom he loves". They echo still in all their strangeness. If we think of God at all, we tend to think that the divine...

The Bible is revolutionary in its understanding of the relationship between God and the human being. In answer to the question, "Why did God create the human being?" the standard answer in the ancient world was, "Because God needed slaves". God was like...

In these final weeks of the Year of Grace and Faith, a journey which began at Pentecost last year, I find myself thinking of doors. Older Australians sometimes speak of a time when people did not lock the doors of their homes, a time when there was more...

At Pentecost, the party is finally over. The fifty days of the Easter festival come to an end. The word "Pentecost" in Greek means "fifty days" to mark the seven weeks since the Passover feast. The feast of Pentecost has deep roots that take us way back...

In this part of the world, we've recently had rain enough to last a lifetime, to say nothing of floods yet again. Water is life, but too much is death; and at times we've had too much. Let's hope for lots of sun this Easter. And yet, water and Easter...

Dear brothers and sisters, In the end, the Bible is a gloriously jubilant book. But it doesn't begin that way, because it's also a grimly realistic book. Its pages are often full of darkness - the murkiness of human affairs, but above all the murkiness...

In the birth of Jesus we see a God who is no indistinct and distant deity, nor a name we give to some vague human instinct. The real God has become enfleshed, in every sense of the word. He has lived among us as one of us. God has a face and a name -...

The beginning of Advent finds us deep in the time when the Year of Grace and the Year of Faith overlap. This will be so until Pentecost next year when the Year of Grace will come to an end. The Year of Faith, however, will continue until the feast of...