Mark Woods

• Mail centre scare as white powder sent to Australian Christian Lobby

  A mail centre in Canberra was evacuated this morning after white powder was discovered in a package addressed to the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL).

• Religious robots: Now you can hire a Buddhist bot for funerals

  Though it has not yet been booked for a service, Softbank's 'Pepper' robot was on display yesterday at a funeral industry fair in Tokyo.

• What should go in to a church statement of faith?

  From the minimal to the microscopically detailed, churches everywhere produce statements of faith for their websites.

• St Bartholomew's Day 1572: When French Protestants suffered their most deadly blow

  One of the saddest aspects of the Reformation, whose beginning 500 years ago in 1517 we remember on October 31, was the violence it provoked.

• Marriage is a gift from God: Why Christians must stop getting so hung up on who weds who

  People really do want to plight their troth and signify their commitment to one person forever.

• Every Job a Parable: How the work we do speaks to us of God

  John Van Sloten has spent the last 20 years exploring a worldview that seeks to discern God's voice in all things.

• Broadcast teaching will help reach 'lost generation' of refugee children deprived of education

  An estimated 13 million children have had their education disrupted or terminated because of various conflicts.

• Philippines Church leaders denounce Duterte regime drugs killings

  More than 12,500 people, many small-time drug users and dealers, have been killed since Duterte took office in June 2016.

• 

  Pope throws down gauntlet to world leaders on migration

  A major new policy document from the Vatican has challenged world leaders to do more for the protection of refugees and migrants.

• White evangelicals are being criticised on race – but Billy Graham showed the way

  One of the world's greatest evangelists showed how it was possible to overcome the prejudices and assumptions of early upbringing.

• Sierra Leone buries its dead: 'We've never seen anything like this,' says Tearfund worker

  Hundreds of people died in what is being described as one of Africa's worst flood disasters when a mountainside collapsed the town of Regent.

• Rewriting history: How statues to dead heroes become community flashpoints

  All over the world there are memorials to people and causes, glorified at the time, that a few decades or hundreds of years render embarrassing.