According to our book of origins, the genesis of the human story was in a beautiful garden, full of flora and fauna, located near the rivers Pishon, Gihon, Tigris and Euphrates. Our first parents, Adam and Eve, gave up their privileged position and so ours in that garden “all for an apple”, disobeying God and committing the Original Sin;

“And the Word was made App and dwelt somewhere in the virtual universe”. It is easy today to inhabit or at least slip in and out of an alternative reality created by devices – iPhones, iPads, Androids, Notebooks, Tablets and Kindles – each with almost endless connectivity, apps and tools, social networks and so on.

Introduction for Annual Mass for Pregnant Mothers, 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B St Mary’s Cathedral Sydney, 23 August 2015 Welcome to you all to this morning’s Solemn Mass at St Mary’s Cathedral. Today we celebrate the annual Mass for Pregnant Mothers; after communion I will bless them and the babies growing within them. […]

We’ve all seen the ads for Lotto in which average punters are tantalized with offers of obscene amounts of money. In one a devoted father is shown giving his pregnant daughter and son-in-law a mortgage-free property.

One of the most successful TV sitcoms of all time was Frasier. It ran for eleven seasons till 2004 and won 37 Emmies…

The low-budget Christian horror-film Final: The Rapture was released late last year. Directed by Timothy Chey, it details the global chaos after all the best people are raptured up to heaven – as some evangelical Christians believe will happen – and follows the stories of four of those left behind. Professional footballer Colin Nelson (played by Jah Shams) is one left stranded when his good Christian wife is assumed into heaven (she’s played, appropriately enough, by an actress named Mary Grace).

The Incorruptibles could be a Marvel Comic or derivative Hollywood blockbuster about superheroes like The Fantastic Four, The Avengers or The X-Men. But in fact the title is a Catholic one, given to those Catholic superheroes, the saints, whose bodies remain substantially incorrupt after their death, people who were so holy in life that God has seen fit miraculously to preserve their bodies from decay, indefinitely or at least for many years after their deaths.

Recently, Disneyland in California, Florida, Paris and Hong Kong banned selfie-sticks. Not because they were troubled with the self-absorption of those who wish to take photos of themselves: selfies will still be allowed. But the Disneylands regard the long sticks as an OHS hazard: sticks that might protrude from their rides and interfere with the mechanisms, or might poke people in the eye or other parts, are no longer permitted.

The word ent has deep roots in the English language. It is Anglo-Saxon (Old English) for ‘giant’. Most people today know it from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and the films based on this. In the second volume, The Two Towers, we meet strong, giant, tree-like shepherds of the forest, most notably in the person of Treebeard.