A man takes his son under false pretences out into the bush. Ties him up. Puts him on a makeshift altar. And takes a knife to his throat (Gen 22:1-18). It’s an appalling story. Could God really want this? How could a man who was willing to do such a thing be celebrated as “our father in faith”?

The ‘Chair of Saint Peter’ was given to Pope John VIII in the year 875 by the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles the Bald. It is the putative seat of the first Bishop of Rome. Though it is the cathedra of St Peter’s Basilica, it is rather difficult to sit in, as it was enclosed in a baroque gilded casing by Bernini, raised high …

Were today not a Sunday it would be the feast day of Blessed Fra Angelico, a Dominican painter on whose feast day I took my vows, and the Patron Saint of Artists. After his fresco of The Baptism of Christ in his cycle for the friars’ cells in the Dominican Priory of San Marco in Florence, comes The Temptation of Christ …

When you hear words like ‘Lent’, ‘fasting’ and ‘abstinence’, what immediately comes to mind? In my childhood it meant giving up what you liked best, like chocolate, for a few weeks, with exceptions made for birthdays, St Patrick’s Day, other solemnities and, in laxer families, Sundays.

Memento homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris: Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return – so we are reminded every Ash Wednesday of the words of the Book of Genesis. It was the moment when humanity had its first premonition of death as a result of …

The British singer-songwriter Steven Demetre Georgiou is better known by his stage name, Cat Stevens. He was all the rage in my adolescence, and perhaps the young Fr Rayner crooned some Cat Stevens with his CYO group. Then, in my last year at school and to everyone’s surprise …

When most people in a country like Australia hear the word ‘slavery’ they think of Africans brought across the sea to work the cotton plantations of America. But since the abolition of slavery in the British colonies in 1833, in the French colonies in 1848, and in the United States with the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, most people would think slavery a …

One of the most highly acclaimed films of the past year is the biographical war drama, Hacksaw Ridge. Andrew Garfield brilliantly plays Desmond Doss, a Seventh Day Adventist Christian who served as a U.S. army medic in the Second World War but refused to bear arms. He was the first conscientious objector …

Well, the verdict is in. After a meticulous search through eight million books published between 1776 and 2009 for positive words such as ‘enjoyment’, ‘peace’ and ‘happiness’, researchers at Warwick University have concluded that 1957 was the happiest year in modern history.