The Australian Government’s religious discrimination bills were in the news again this week:

• Religious bill rights under question
• Attorney general defends religious schools’ right to sack teachers for views on sexuality

Concerns were raised when the third version was released:

• Third time lucky? What has changed in the latest draft of the religious discrimination bill?
• Religious discrimination bill: Does the blessing of the law give us the right to discriminate?

Uniting Church minister Elenie Poulos submitted:

Religious freedom and freedom of speech should be protected in Australian Commonwealth law under a comprehensive human rights charter that would give effect to Australia’s obligations to protect people’s human rights. In the absence of any political will to enact such a charter, religious freedom and the right to be free from discrimination on the basis of religion, should be protected in terms consistent with current anti-discrimination laws. This Bill should not be passed in its current form.

She also wrote:

• New religious discrimination bill will cause damage to Australian society that will be difficult to heal

Other commentary:

• ACT government criticises federal religious discrimination bills, warns laws would 'erode' local protections
• Coalition’s religious discrimination bill will erode rights of people with disability, advocates say

Attorney-General’s Department:

• Religious Discrimination Bills 2021

RNA board member and treasurer Ken Chitwood, new editor of Religion Link, presents seven religion stories to cover (including resources and potential sources) in 2022.

• Democracy, autocracy and … aliens
• Major SCOTUS decisions
• Endemic religion
• Religious communities and climate change
• The continuing rise of “spirit tech”
• Religious economies
• International sporting events and human rights

Meanwhile, the Religion Media Centre’s Ruth Peacock reports that census, conflict, confusion, Covid, crisis, change and closure are the predicted themes of stories about religion that will hit the headlines in 2022.

(Image credit: wagdi.co.uk CCLicense2.0)

The virus has made godly institutions take stock of their commercial as well as spiritual assets, says The Economist.

William Deresiewicz, writing for Salmagundi 212 - 213, Fall 2021 - Winter 2022, says:

As a replacement for religion, humanism has not fulfilled the hopes that people had for it, and neither has secularism in any of its other manifestations. They never can, and they never will. And so modernity is fated to be raked by periodic gusts of religious enthusiasm—Romanticism, communism, spiritualism, even the 60s itself, with its social crusades, its shamanistic drugs, its rock and roll revival meetings. Like all millenarian movements, each enthusiasm thinks that it’s the final one, the end of history and the transfiguration of the species, and each one falls in turn. I have no doubt that, whatever their social residues, both woke-ism and the cult of Trump will go the same way.

But if the substitute religions of modernity have not fulfilled the hopes that people had for them, then neither has religion ...

I was sent a copy of Greg Sheridan’s Christians: The Urgent Case for Jesus in Our World (Allen & Unwin $32.95) but have been reluctant to review it because I’m not the type of reader who is comfortable with this sort of case-making.

However, I did learn something about The Lord of the Rings in the chapter on "Smuggling Christ into popular culture".

Here is Sheridan with a plug for the book on ABC TV’s The Drum (near the end), including a discussion of Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his faith (15 pages in Christians), Marc Fennell on Pentecostal churches and Maha Abdo on her faith.

And here are some reviews, glowing and critical:

• Paul Morrissey of Campion College
• Guy Rundle at Crikey
• Paul George
• Ian Palmer for the Melbourne Anglican
• Tony Abbott in The Spectator
• Michael McGirr in the Sydney Morning Herald

The Religion News Service (RNS) has announced the launch of Religion Hub, a new feature that highlights the religion journalism of RNS, The Associated Press and The Conversation/US.

The Initiative seeks to:

• improve understanding of the world of faith
• increase the volume and reach of high-quality news stories about religious faith and practice and the impact of religion in the US and around the world
• provide balanced and nuanced coverage of major world religions, with an emphasis on explaining the religious practices and principles behind current events and cultural movements.

The 1000 Women in Religion Project, a major initiative of the American Academy of Religion/Society of Biblical Literature’s Women’s Caucus, is working to add biographies to Wikipedia, where over 80% of biographical entries are currently about men.

The University of Divinity is taking a lead role in coordinating an Australian contribution. The goal is to create 100 new Wikipedia entries for Australian women in religion in 2020, in addition to updating and improving already-published articles.

Nick Spencer reviews Stephen Asma’s Why We Need Religion for Prospect:

Asma looks at grief, forgiveness, resilience, sacrifice, joy, fear and other deep emotions besides. Time and again, he shows how religion contains “cultural structures that enshrine and celebrate some important adaptive psychological” states, drawing on evidence that would have upset his younger, more muscular secular self. Empirical studies, he writes half way through, confirm our long held assumption that “religious people try more than others to overcome their grudges.” Similarly, the evidence that education increases forgiveness and reduces violence “is somewhat thin.” The second of these is eminently believable but even I have problems believing the former. If true, there are certainly some pretty powerful counter-examples.

In a recent submission to Australia's attorney-general’s office, Erin Wilson, Associate Professor of Politics and Religion, University of Groningen, highlighted a key problem of the Australian government’s proposed religious discrimination bill. She said it was a problem that could affect religious minorities in particular – that it did not explain what was meant by the terms “religion” and “religious”.

She explained in The Conversation.

Tanya Levin writes for The Saturday Paper:

Morrison’s life is his faith. He says the Bible is not a policy handbook, but his every move as prime minister has been informed by it. He is a literalist and he believes his office to be a reward from God. He is the first Pentecostal to lead a nation. What comes next is God’s will.