The housing crisis is seeing more than 4000 children growing up in motels across New Zealand, devastating parents who are desperate to find a permanent place for their kids to live. Skyrocketing house prices are prompting many landlords to sell, forcing up rents which are becoming unaffordable for many families. Figures released to Checkpoint show Read more
Posts Tagged ‘children’
Keeping children safe in the Catholic Church
Monday, February 15th, 2021
Sexual abuse perpetrated by Roman Catholic priests has been headline news for years. But even with so much press attention, there are many commonly accepted misconceptions about this. Remarkably, evidence-based research doesn’t always receive attention, while sensationalized stories that create a particular—and sometimes false—narrative do. This ultimately misinforms and harms the public—not to mention efforts to keep Read more
Suffer the little children as adults experimented
Monday, September 21st, 2020
The 1970s was not a time anyone in their right mind should feel nostalgic for. It’d be a difficult ask if you actually lived through its madness. Maybe you might recall Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry movies is worthy of note, but I can only watch them in fury today – as I did then. Starting Read more
Pandemic highlights social problems and inequality
Sunday, August 30th, 2020
The pandemic is highlighting and exacerbating social problems, especially inequality, Pope Francis said at his General Audience last Wednesday. Focusing his talk on the fourth of his “Healing the World” series, Francis is urging everyone to check statistics to see how many children are dying of hunger because of a poor distribution of wealth and Read more
Arms trade is killing thousands of women and children
Monday, August 10th, 2020
The drums of war are beating ever louder as arms traders supply weapons for war in the Middle East while the superpowers line up in confrontational posturing in a show of might and military power. “Might is right” is the thinking behind the three biggest military powers vying for prestige and power in the world. Read more
ChildFund, NZ govt target Pacific youth well-being
Monday, July 13th, 2020The charity ChildFund has gone into partnership with the New Zealand government to improve well-being in the Asia Pacific region. The $NZ11.2 million ‘Impact programme,’ to which New Zealand’s foreign ministry will contribute about $NZ8.6 million, targets children, youth and their families in Kiribati, Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste, Cambodia, Vietnam, and the Solomon Islands over Read more
Are children hardwired to believe in God?
Monday, December 2nd, 2019
University of Oxford developmental psychologist Dr. Olivera Petrovich has spent years researching a single question: Are children predisposed to belief in a transcendent being? This research, much deserving of greater exposure, intrigued me, since I have engaged atheism’s most prominent modern proponents. I chaired three of atheist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’s debates with his Read more
Declining baptisms: Rethinking spirituality of Baptism
Monday, November 18th, 2019
The great doorway to growing in the Christian faith is narrowing from year to year in Quebec as baptisms have significantly declined in since 2012 and there’s no indication the trend will reverse. Confronted with a shift away from traditional practices of transmitting the faith in childhood, leaders in the Quebec church are rethinking how Read more
Vatican, big-tech team up to protect minors
Monday, November 18th, 2019A coalition of big-tech companies and institutions meeting at the Vatican starting Thursday (Nov. 14) seeks to create a safe environment for children on the internet through cooperation and concrete actions. The international and interreligious conference, “Promoting Digital Child Dignity: From Concept to Action,” was organized to combat the multiplying risks and challenges of the Read more
Fertility rate threatening NZ’s economic growth
Thursday, September 26th, 2019
New Zealand’s total fertility rate has reached an all-time low. An average of 1.71 children per woman in New Zealand is well below population replacement level and threatens economic growth and the country’s social balance and structure. Population replacement and growth is only coming by way of immigration. The claims come in “Families: Ever Fewer Read more