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David Marr's withering piece on Tony Abbot completes the political trinity. These writers manage the impossible: they have me feeling sorry for politicians. Well, almost. I'm not sure if such magnanimity is allowed in an election year. But what a pleasure to discover those grey Canberran corridors harbouring such a chiaroscuro of emotion.
Life of Pi offers two stories. Both concern a boy who survives a shipwreck and spends months adrift in a lifeboat. One is constructed from mundane albeit horrific facts; the other, from visual and mystical wonders, scenes of terror and transcendence that seek no less than to better understand God. Which do you prefer?
Donkeys are gorgeous but make an ugly sound. Sadly, religious discussion in Australia too often sounds like donkeys competing to see whose braying is the loudest and ugliest. Recently Christian lobbyists spread misinformed messages about sexual orientation. Loud braying was heard on Saturday too when a group of louts hijacked what should have been a peaceful Muslim protest. Tuesday 18 September
The pack mentality that led military personnel to ingore instances of rape seemed also to be at play on the Melbourne bus where a French woman suffered a tirade of abuse while most passengers sat silently by. An American journalist has argued that a peer group's creation of a social norm of human kindness could be the most effective way to encourage defiance to an immoral order.
What was she to do? Mr J. J. Bullfinch would surely rescue her if he knew of her plight. He would stride out into the traffic and it would stop when he raised his hand. But why should she imagine he'd come? He hardly knew her. She was alone, sitting on the grass shaking from the shock of being nearly hit by a bus.
The Hon. Michael Kirby recently said those in the churches expecting gay people to be celibate should start thinking about 'real moral questions'. If some Christians are obsessed with sex, it is because many human beings are. The ethical 'supply' exists to meet the demand, and when it comes to sexual ethics, the demand is not being met by secular society.
BBC director general Mark Thompson turned down a proposal to erect a statue of Orwell on the broadcaster's premises because the writer was 'too left-wing'. But political animals of all stripes have long sought to claim Orwell. His political writing transcends both time and ideology.
Donkeys are gorgeous but make an ugly sound. Sadly, religious discussion in Australia too often sounds like donkeys competing to see whose braying is the loudest and ugliest. Recently Christian lobbyists spread misinformed messages about sexual orientation. Loud braying was heard on Saturday too when a group of louts hijacked what should have been a peaceful Muslim protest.
Death is different at night ... A cool light we gently call dawn enters the tree tops and so enters me. I am entering the next world ... Can it be in some secret way I am dead?
I've come to believe that the world beyond the institutional Church is kinder, gentler, full of more conscientious ethics, values and care for others; that the secular world in which lay people live is more functional and more ready to conscience-examine than the institutional Church. Why then am I still a Catholic?
Any discussion of the morality of torture must distinguish two kinds of justification. The first is concerned with cases so exotic they have nothing to do with the ordinary affairs of mankind, such as the nuclear bomb ticking away in a New York basement. A real-life justification must provide a rationale for a wide range of common garden cases.
About four years ago I had the great pleasure to spend four days with Peter Steele while he was at Georgetown. Hearing that he had died, I went back to those interviews, hours and hours we spent on things like the first time he read Billy Collins, growing up in Perth, unexpected blessings, and the never-ending catalogue of characters and words that fascinated and delighted him.