The Sydney year starts in February. The long summer holidays are over with. Christmas is but a memory. The work starts in earnest and so we commence the Cathedral programme.

Bus advertisements by evangelistically-minded atheists are urging people to wake up and enjoy the godless life, but I often get the opposite response when people discover that I have a faith. "Im jealous of your beliefs "I wish I could be certain like you."

Demographers are using a new documentary to predict an international crisis of such proportions that they believe will put global warming in the shade.

One ABC TV pundit called last Tuesday 'the greatest day in Australia's macro-economic history'. Given that even the forgotten depression of the 1890s gave us the shearers' strikes, Waltzing Matilda and the Australian Labor Party, this is an absurd over-statement, writes Jeremy Halcrow.

We were talking about the terrible case of the little girl thrown over the Westgate Bridge in Melbourne the week before. It is something that particularly and deeply horrified us.

The Year of Magical Thinking is an intensely personal account of the pain of loss, by the celebrated journalist Joan Didion.

When a nearby car accident drew everyone out of their houses, an ordinary mum had a great insight on how to 'Pray. Expect. Connect.' with her neighbours – typically average middle-class families and retirees.

If Stephanie Meyers first book about the love-life of a teenage would-be vampire is about the struggle of beginning an unlikely relationship, then the second is about the pain of losing it.