First they came for the explorers.  Statues' live matter.  The culture war has ramped up in these Covid times, perhaps unexpectedly.  It behooves those of us with an affection for tradition and freedom to, first, understand the war we are in, and then to comprehend what needs to be done to fight back.

China is in the news.  With Covid and with trade wars, the world has begun to question its embrace of China over these past decades.  With good reason.  A repulsive regime has been granted the keys to the world economy.  On our watch.

The Covid Crisis has thrown up its own set of "tribes", interest groups with different stakes in the way the thing is playing out.  Understanding the ideologies and the interests of the various players helps us all to make sense of the crazy times in which we live

Two important things happened on the weekend of 6-7 June.  A court upheld the right to protest in large numbers in public, even in times of real or manufactured health scares.  This has implications for lockdown policies.  The second important thing to happen was that we can go to Church again.  For this, we should, all of us, bend the knee.

The Covid scare has taken even further the tendency for politicians, ideologues and interest groups of all stripes to politicise death.  Already seen during tragedies and natural disasters, political actors rush to embrace crises, and they now even sometimes make them up.  Death counts are now a part of daily political life, and the new currency of political debate.  This is an unseemly development.

The ruling class is real, and it dominates our culture.  It is also embedded in the modern, intrusive, all-powerful state.  The current COVID scare provides a perfect case study of the sources and consequences of our democratic dilemma.  The people have seemingly handed over their sovereignty to the State, without noticing what this surrender means.

The current time is a crazy time of postmodern politics, where previous certainties and categories are no longer relevant.  Trying to make sense of it all is an extreme challenge.  But there are ways of understanding the new politics, and of explaining how it all came about.  What hope there might be for a better future is less certain.

The recent public and legal focus on the George Pell case obscures many other, less publicly known cases of innocent Catholic priests being falsely accused of sex crimes.  One relates to Fr John Fleming.  His awful story needs to be told and the lessons from it learned.

We are asked to forgive our enemies, as core business of Christian life.  How do we best forgive, in a culture of non forgiveness?  Who and what should we forgive?

The COVID scare has hit us like a meteor, without warning and with great consequences for our freedoms and our rights.  Is what the State says right?  Is our way of life under threat?  And does the State even know what it is doing?