Dr Paul Allen

The  editorial  in  The Age  last month could scarcely contain its enthusiasm that the Andrews government in Victoria had recently decided to end Special Religious Instruction (SRI) in school hours and replace it with lectures on domestic violence and respectful relationships. The editor writes: "At last, classrooms in the government school system in this state will be used for what they were intended: academic teaching and not religious instruction. Some 143 years after Victoria's Education Act made clear that education must be free, secular and compulsory, the Andrews government has committed to abolishing special religious instruction classes during school hours. That is as it should be. The Age has consistently argued over decades that, beyond reading, writing and arithmetic, there should be room for lessons about various belief systems and for discussion about ethics and social awareness. But the school hours funded by the taxpayer should not be used for indoc

Image by notashamed via Flickr From: Challies.com   Mark Driscoll will be all over the news in the new year. Not only is he set to be a participant at the controversial Elephant Room conference on January 25, but January 3 will also mark the release of his newest book—the one that is bound to become his most controversial yet:  Real Marriage : The Truth About Sex, Friendship & Life Together . Co-authored with his wife Grace, the book is being marketed as a down-to-earth and no-holds-barred look at marriage and sex. Especially sex. Though  Real Marriage  weighs in at over 200 pages and 11 chapters, there is one chapter that is going to generate the vast majority of the buzz. I plan to write a review of the whole book closer to the release date. For now, though, I want to reflect on that one chapter. Before I go any farther I need to warn you that the contents of this blog post and any that follow are going to deal with topics that are uncomfortable for many people (myself includ

Image via Wikipedia Sex Is Cheap  - Here’s an interesting article from Slate with a look at today’s sexual economics. “Despite the fact that women are holding the sexual purse strings, they aren’t asking for much in return these days—the market ‘price’ of sex is currently very low.”