Professor of Education, Trevor Cairney responds to the proposed reforms to higher education in Australia.

Unless you’ve been overseas for the last year you will have heard that the federal minister for education, Dr Brendan Nelson, has been reviewing higher education. Education (like health) has always been an important political agenda. While all Australians receive school education, not all are privileged to gain a place in university education.

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Michael Jensen’s essential verbs for those who wish to be apologists for the Christian faith.

What I would like to propose amounts (I hope!) to a strategy for apologetics informed by the Scriptures, theology, culture and the dynamics of human communication. Recognize that apology may be given in a range of settings: in a personal conversation, in a youth group or Bible study group to people who are mainly Christians, in a lecture, in an

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Winged sandals—a very stylish Flash-based introduction to Greek mythology, courtesy of the University of Melbourne Centre for Classics and Archaeology and ABC online.

http://www.abc.net.au/arts/wingedsandals/

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Far from spawning amorality, reality TV only serves to highlight the ethical dilemma of postmodern etiquette - how humans should relate to one another. But what can Christians bring to the table and how can they present the gospel to postmoderns?

Gazza and Cherie have known each other for six hours. Gazza’s in the bathroom of the resort hotel in which he, Cherie and a few other ‘couples’ are staying—courtesy of a commercial television

Paul Brebner considers the internet and information architecture, and asks whether there is such a thing as ‘Christian architecture’.

Having grown up in a number of small country towns in New Zealand, my view of architecture was that buildings and city layout are always more or less the same—suburban 3-bedroom houses on acre blocks being the norm. It takes a trip to somewhere where buildings and cities were built in a different era, on different

Oliver O’Donovan has written a sharp new book which reshapes Just War thinking in a Gulf War II environment.

Ernst Juenger fought in the final German offensive of World War I. Here is his account of his unit’s advance:

The great moment had come. The curtain of fire lifted from the front trenches. We stood up. With a mixture of feelings, evoked by bloodthirstiness, rage, and intoxication, we moved in step, ponderously but irresistibly toward the

Bishop to the Defence Force, Tom Frame, writes about UNSW students, actress Judy Davis, the war in Iraq, and whether political activism about war is a thing of the past.

A war against Iraq would be aggressive, destructive, unnecessary, protracted, illegal, and evil. These were some of the public assessments made early in 2003 about the proposed multinational campaign to disarm Iraq of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs). The subsequent conflict,

The resurgence of religious violence at the start of the twenty-first century has reinforced the myth of secular tolerance—the notion that whereas religious believers are instinctively intolerant, tolerance comes naturally to the secular mind. This paper challenges the myth. It suggests that secular people are not immune from the temptation to persecute and vilify others, and argues that the Christian Gospel fostered the rise of religious

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Negative, positive, apologia, kategoria ... and something else. Greg Clarke introduces CASE’s approach to apologetics.

It is a good rule in life never to apologise. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them. (P.G. Wodehouse)

It is tempting to apologise for the presence of the word ‘apologetic’ in the name of this new venture which I have been employed to direct, the Centre for Apologetic

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In the 2003 Smith Lecture, John Dickson outlined the major flaws in a ‘pluralistic’ outlook in both the popular pluralism of contemporary culture or the more sophisticated pluralism of the academy. He then considers whether Christianity can stand up in the face of its claims.

Pluralism’s fatal flaw
One problem can be stated quite simply. In seeking to affirm all religious perspectives, pluralistic cultures like ours tend to honour none of