Search Results: Insight
There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Tim Kroenert
- 26 February 2015
2 Comments
Snowden is both passionate and highly articulate, wanting nothing less noble than to see the delineation between those with power and the people over whom they wield it redrawn. The real meat of the matter is not the revelations themselves, but how in their light governments and societies desiring security will move to decide just how much freedom they are willing to surrender in order to acquire it.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Tim Kroenert
- 29 January 2015
1 Comment
Cheryl Strayed is haunted by her past — by her own sins, and by tragedies that have befallen her. As she walks, she hums, and the music she hears in her head leads her in and out of the past. Her solo 1600-plus km trek along America's Pacific Crest Trail is a metaphor for her life: each hardship she overcomes brings her a step closer to facing down the fierce regrets that gnash at her heels.
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INTERNATIONAL
- Nikolas Feith Tan
- 03 December 2014
9 Comments
Israel is one of the world's developed countries that is attempting to deter asylum seekers from accessing the protection that international refugee law entitles them to. Yet Israel is a state with refugeehood in its roots. Israeli refugee advocates have encouraged a change of policy on the basis of Jewish exile in Egypt as recorded in the Torah.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Tim Kroenert
- 30 October 2014
1 Comment
Orphan Abdul loves Fatemeh, but her father is demanding a prohibitive dowry for her hand. The financial wrangling between Abdul's guardian Mahboba and Fatemah's father Nik, and all this implies about the ways in which young women's futures can be sold and traded as part of an archaic cultural norm, seems crass and is more than a little disturbing to witness.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Tim Kroenert
- 16 October 2014
3 Comments
Mothers-of-four Kris and Sandra had wed before a contingent of family and friends, only to be later advised by post that their marriage was void. Paul and Jeffrey refused to embrace an alternative form of legal recognition of their relationship that would render them as 'second-class citizens'. Their conservative lawyer Ted Olson argues that marriage is a fundamentally conservative institution that would only be strengthened by extending it to same-sex couples.
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AUSTRALIA
- Tseen Khoo
- 09 September 2014
4 Comments
The research sector in Australia is increasingly one marked by casualisation and disappearing career paths. The depressed nature of working in this environment means that the very people who we'd want to solve our society's most crucial, pressing issues are the ones who will be looking elsewhere to establish their careers. How do we equip our community with better ways to live, work and connect without research? Where will answers to persistent problems come from?
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MEDIA
- Megan Graham
- 14 August 2014
16 Comments
As human beings we do all kinds of things to avoid suffering. Drink, drugs, hobbies, television, retail therapy. The list is endless. It is our job to survive and avoid suffering: to huddle around our loved ones, to live and thrive and not let the shit of life get us down. For Robin Williams, it seems avoiding suffering was a very hard task.
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RELIGION
- Peter Vardy
- 01 August 2014
27 Comments
At the least, religious philosophers and theologians should further engage with the challenge to traditional ethics that Peter Singer's position provides. Singer puts forward a powerful case and it is one which, in the current climate where people seek happiness and quality of life above everything else, will find increasing support particularly with the difficulty of funding medical care for those who are old or disabled.
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AUSTRALIA
Many Australians regard these asylum seekers as economic refugees. But systematic discrimination against Tamils in Sri Lanka has existed since the country gained independence from Britain in 1948. Tamils are a minority, and are systematically and routinely treated as second-class citizens by the majority Sinhalese community. The extreme Sinhalese nationalist view regards Sri Lanka as an island sacred to Buddhism, in which non-Sinhalese have no place.
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AUSTRALIA
- Frank Brennan
- 08 July 2014
8 Comments
The prime minister stumbled last week when he said: 'I guess our country owes its existence to a form of foreign investment by the British government in the then unsettled or, um scarcely settled, Great South Land.' His Indigenous advisor Warren Mundine said: 'I know his heart is in the right place.' With hearts in the right place, we can all forgive and be forgiven.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Barry Gittins
- 04 July 2014
2 Comments
This was akin to reading a carefully vetted resume. An intelligent and formidable first lady, senator and Secretary of State, and no shrinking violet, the author presents a largely passionless, desiccated record. There's the odd poignant reflection. Absurd depictions of Mel Brooksian secure rooms (and the reading of documents with a blanket over her head in non-secure rooms). But, overall, Clinton draws pictures without drawing blood.
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RELIGION
- Frank Brennan
- 24 June 2014
53 Comments
'My one new insight from reading Bill's book is that he was sacked because he was too much a team player with his local church ... the Romans hoped to shatter the morale and direction of those who had planned the pastoral strategies of a country diocese stretched to the limits as a Eucharistic community soon to be deprived of priests in the Roman mould.' Frank Brennan launches Benedict, Me and the Cardinals Three by Bishop William Morris.
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