Café

• 
  The Hardest Sermons You’ll Ever Have To Preach
  Reviewed by Hans Kristensen
• 
  Little Black Books: Science and God
  Reviewed by Andrew Laird
• 
  Making the Most of the Cross
  Reviewed by Lesley Hicks
• 
  Higher Ground
  Reviewed by Andrew Laird

• Eternity’s new site reports from atheist convention
• We’re publishing daily news articles
• Our new home
• Coming soon a new web home for Eternity

• Ethical Investment
• Sarah’s Key - the consequences of truth
• Ben Witherington III: Jesus and Women
• Harry Potter’s Critique of Western Extravagance

• Should Churches Halt Missions Trips to Mexico?
• Helping Urbana Find Its Voice
• Culture Making Amid Cancer: The Choices That Suffering Makes Possible
• The Choir's Steve Hindalong: Celebrating Sobriety
• Bolder As I Got Balder: How God Used Breast Cancer to Give Me Courage

Council of Churches says drop the Ethics classes. Anglicans say wait a while.

6:59pm Wednesday, 27th July 2011  

The NSW Council of Churches has called for the NSW Government to repeal the laws that set up ethics classes in state schools. The Classes run in the same time slot as Scripture.

“The classes were introduced, trialed, supposedly reviewed, permanently introduced and then legislated for, all in the dying days of a government bent on appeasing a minority of inner city voters in a desperate attempt to get re-elected”, said the Richard Quadrio, President of the NSW Council of Churches.

“The then opposition initially promised that if they were elected they would remove these classes being held at the same time as SRE,” said Rev Quadrio.

The NSW Council of Churches report that the new Liberal Premier Mr O’Farrell made it crystal clear at a gathering of church leaders before the 2011 state election that the only reason they had changed their policy was that they would not control the upper house after the election.

“Now it’s time for the new O’Farrell government to live up to its original commitment to reverse Labor’s ethics in schools program,” said Rev Quadrio.

However Sydney’s Anglicans are not pushing for any immediate to change the new law. “In the vast majority of cases, the students attending the ethics lessons have been non-SRE attenders” says Dr Bryan Cowling, Executive Director, of the (Sydney) Anglican Education Commission.

Sydney Anglican diocese’s position remains that ethics should not have been placed in direct competition with Special Religious Education.

But they support delaying any change. “In the Commission’s view, the current arrangements must be allowed testing and fine-tuning and it would be most unhelpful if they were disrupted so early in the life of the new legislation” says Cowling. “It is for this reason that the AEC favours the maintenance of the current arrangements. Only after the new arrangements have been in place for 12-24 months would there be any advantage in conducting a review of the legislation.”