Readers and critics alike praise his work, but John Dickson still feels like a bit of a fraud.

The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers is a slender volume, more an elegy or a poem than a novel. It captures the essence of a soldiers life in and around the battlefield, not on it, and does this well. It captures the mundanity and profanity of everyday soldier life, leavened with the deeper thinking that only a soldiers sense of imminent mortality can bring. And yet, there is very little plot, only the remembrances of a former soldier, Frederick Benteen, composing correspondence.

When she speaks, they listen - Jenni Woodhouse along with Lisa Watts handing out essential advice to Sydney clergy on how to keep children safe from the perpetrators of sexual abuse.

Of the 12 parishes which missed out on hiring an assistant minister this year, six were in the West and three were in Wollongong.

Organisers of the Ignite film competition are finding themselves awash with entries for this years water-themed event at the Sydney Town Hall.

The Harry Potter series has two enduring interests: the battle between good and evil, and the education of young Harry. What is going to happen, and what sort of person will Harry be at the end of it all? In the second-last book of the series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, matters develop satisfyingly in both areas, and leave us ready and anxious for the final volume in which, it is assumed and had better be the case, All Will Be Revealed.

Union and church leaders agree. Australian Christians must fight to stop the Federal Government from making Sunday - our 'day of rest - a thing of the past.

Jan Rees is a poet and an associate minister at St Augustine's, Neutral Bay. The following verses are her reflections on the devastating terrorist attacks on the city of London over the past weeks. In it she poses the crucial question, what has become of the Christian distinctiveness in a world rent by innocent deaths?