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spires nosed upwards to touch the celestial concert of bodies ... We emulate with half-lame gestures, insufficient and diffuse, dissolving into air like smoke ascending from a goat on an altar — as if God were open to flattery
One striking feature of our society is the contrast between an emphasis on tolerance, and an increasingly punitive approach to lawbreaking. Shock jock Kyle Sandilands and violent youths in our cities have been exposed to this.
Our failure to care for and honour our elderly is one of the great causes of moral impoverishment in our culture. Lives tempered by age and hard-earned virtue are gifts from God. It is to our detriment that we ignore them.
A compulsive fire lighter sets fire to a few leaves. The fire grows and ends up causing many deaths. While it is momentarily satisfying to find someone on whom to fix blame for the fires, it is unhelpful to be fixated in blame.
I mounted up and rode ... into a dream of silent shuttered houses ... I waited for an outraged God to strike me down ... for flaunting breasts and pubic hair
'For me, talk of the death penalty evoked the young, frightened faces of Scott and Emmanuel, as well as the laughing, haughty faces of Amrozi, Mukhlas and Imam Samudra.' Full text from Frank Brennan's session on 'Killing People for Killing People', Ubud Writers Festival, 17 October 2008.
While he was best known for his unrelenting criticism of the Soviet system, Alexander Solzhenitsyn also provided a devastating critique of the excesses of Western capitalism.
Literary festivals introduce us to new writing. They rarely celebrate the old, for nothing is older than an old book. The works of St Augustine challenge our instinctive assumption that new wisdom supersedes old wisdom.
In the election campaign the peoples' choice and their sovereignty often seemed to be defined simply as an arbitrary power to choose, with self-interest the only motivation. In the first week of the campaign, tax cuts trumped tax cuts.
The internal logic of total security regards the dignity of people who stand in the way, as dispensable. Once respect for some human beings is treated as optional, the human dignity of those offered security becomes equally dispensable.
With his mother coming and going from the house and his life, Augustine has to find his way to adulthood. Running With Scissors feels like walking through a human zoo where we observe the insane antics of one caged character after another.
Scorsese’s is a fallen world. Like Cain, his tortured characters are driven further into the wastelands – whether the desert or the untamed streets of New York – by their acts of almost mythical violence, until any remaining vestige of hope or virtue is finally extinguished.