From the Principal

Dear Friends,

Congratulations to all our students who have done well in sporting carnivals and camps, including City Cite, over the past few weeks. Junior School Athletics and Senior School Swimming carnivals have been highlights, alongside the Year 7 camp this week. The last few weeks of term are always hectic with student reporting season on the horizon. I trust families will enjoy the last fortnight of Term 1.

I also congratulate our College Captains for the initiative in raising awareness of the plight of people in Ukraine and the prayerful and practical support of this nation in the midst of deep trauma. The voluntary nature of this event was greatly appreciated as were the donations received for Samaritan’s Purse. This is a Christian group on the ground in Ukraine providing medical and material assistance to people in dire need. It is inspiring to see student-led compassion in action given our society seems to have developed a collective intolerance to personal responsibility over the last couple of years. 

The pandemic has encouraged a new expectation among many people, that governments must control and solve everything, including delivering us from every potential harm and at any cost. Our freedoms become expendable in the interests of safety. This is an interesting topic that has been extended beyond the health issues of a pandemic to concepts of psychological safety in families and institutions. It is in families and institutions where questions about the emerging and problematic culture of progressive thought and action are now most often raised. One could rightly feel in Victoria that the mantra of equality is used against freedoms that were taken for granted in past times. It is a mantra that can also fly in the face of objective truth, so that the things we say not only express inner thoughts, but they also go on to shape our beliefs.

Because legislated approaches to equality are only concerned with externalities, they create and then extend another problem in the neglect of inward human realities. Equality under law doesn’t honour the essential primacy of the heart, soul, and conscience of an individual. Laws only touch a person’s character indirectly. An ethic of virtue, on the other hand, is concerned with an individual’s obligation to be a certain kind of person with a certain kind of character. 

Inward virtue is the individual’s decision to develop their character in love towards their neighbour. When people collectively and cheerfully act out of love for neighbour, then constant increases in law, regulation and policing are not required. But where there are relatively few individuals with this self-governing commitment to love and integrity, then legislation and regulation usually increase because such individuals must be directed and then externally forced by threat of punishment to do what is required in every contingency. In contrast, the individual who has incorporated into life the two great commandments – to love God and to love one’s neighbour – has within them enduring perspectives that develop character and bring joy. These Christian virtues are in accord with the essence of our being, that we are made for love.

Warm regards,

Dr Douglas Peck