The world is a wonderful & beautiful place, despite all the negativity frequently preached at us. Nature is wonderful. Biology is wonderful.

Humanity and its many endeavours, is intriguing, despite all the negativity broadcast at us. We all have desires for happiness centred in happy and valuable social interactions. These are more likely with less sectarianism.

Ah, the predictable turn to nature. I agree, nature is beautiful except, perhaps the ebola virus and quite a few other very nasty things. The Christmas day Tsunami was nature at its most powerful, thousands of lives snuffed out in a short time. The problem with nature is that it is dumb, what does it say? If it bears witness to life it equally bears witness to death. The two cancel each other out.

Heavens, between the always boring efforts of the Singer to whitewash Israel and the two topics on God and why we should concentrate on the beauty of Jesus, I wonder whether OLO is going strange on us or, perhaps, it has been taken over by a radical religious institution!

Of course, there is the article on sex with your pet to balance things up a bit. What worries me is the situation of the man in the street trying to juggle the perfect image of Jesus with a man having sex with his canary. It is likely to lead to short in the mental system of most humans and acts of madness!

OLO should be careful what it wishes for!

I write not in anger at “The Church”, nor at any belief system within which a civilized society is enabled - but!
I do write in apprehension as to what reforming zealotry might accomplish; there are many babies in the bathwater.
I find beauty in many of the trappings of religions: the stained-glass windows, beautifully-structured altars such as that one made of Jarrah in the Catholic Church of Margaret River, the glow of sunshine on that spire-mounted crescent-moon of Canberra’s mosque, the spontaneous musicality of many Welsh in their Methodism, absolutely “divine” renditions of Handel’s Messiah and such-like (why does this music need interpretation of the accompanying cadence of human voice?).
We just have to face it - when the Lion lies down with the Lamb, the good and the bad are intertwined. That is the nature of things, and the bad part of all beliefs is so much totalitarian attitude associated with a lack of understanding of this.

As an atheist with a Anglican upbringing I still love the language of the King James bible and the Book of Common Prayer. The modern dumbing down of the language of worship is not only an insult to the intelligence of the congregation , it makes being in church (weddings, funerals) an excruciating experience.

Peter Sellick offers us a "back to the future' aesthetic (rather than theological) response to his question, "What now for the Church in late modernity?"

Nice, Pete - but no cigar! No mention of confronting the issues of modernity with a relevant ecclesial institutional response. There is no mention of an institutional and much needed "reformation" that must deal with the real issues of clerical sexual abuse of children, or the notion of enforced celibacy in the 21st century, or the negative response to women by some mainline churches.

Where is the "example" of a lived Christianity by those very people who have "devoted" their lives to Gospel values? if Peter is correct is surmising that the Christian "be different from the surrounding culture" then why is it so hard to see this even superficially in the wider community? For example, when is the last time you saw a "clerical collar" in the wider community giving witness to this particular chosen vocation?

More pertinently, the Christian churches continuously fail to give witness to "Christ's living presence" because they have themselves become so enmeshed in the secularism of their own age that any distinction between "them and us" no longer applies.

Yuri