Until very recently, people with intersex variations have often been unseen, stigmatised and routinely discriminated against. Intersex Awareness Day (October 26) is therefore an opportunity to examine how much progress has been made and how far we still have to go. It’s estimated 1.7 to 4% of people globally are intersex – meaning they don’t Read more
The Christian mystic and philosopher Simone Weil wrote that “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.” Indeed, we can only love something insofar as we direct our pure, generous attention toward it—be that to God, to a neighbour or to ourselves. And in a world that so hungrily demands it, Read more
Curbs on children’s access to online pornography need to be brought in urgently to stop the spread of an activity that is partly to blame for normalising sexual harassment in schools, according to the new children’s commissioner for England. Dame Rachel de Souza is urging governments and tech companies to introduce age verification checks. She Read more
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
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
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
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
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
The 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
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