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The situation in Afghanistan isn't getting better. It is getting much, much worse. If we are thinking about sending more troops to counter the Taliban, we must also think about accepting more Afghani asylum seekers fleeing the regime.
Every day, Australians face north and scan the horizon. Has another boat arrived? But if our politicians and journalists want to see asylum seekers living in poor conditions, they need to look closer to home.
Fr Frank Brennan's address to the Melbourne College of Divinity Centenary Conference, Trinity College, University of Melbourne, 6 July 2010.
Christmas is a time for hospitality, and hospitality is central in the Christian tradition. You may not have thought this was so when, recently, the Anglican Church in Bendigo, Vic., was denied the use of a Catholic cathedral for the ordination of four female deacons.
Last week, Pope Benedict gave Kevin Rudd a copy of his new encyclical Caritas in Veritate. Rudd gave the Pope a copy of the National Apology. I wonder what the radical Redfern priest Ted Kennedy would have made of this exchange of literary gifts.
There he was, this hunched over figure of a man, sitting in one of the furthermost pews, detached, eyes withdrawn, his face pale, features old and weather beaten. John O'Malley was always a mystery.
Frank Costigan was a man of such moral authority that you would not need to speak to him, just think, 'What would Frank do?' When Frank was being wheeled in for surgery, he completed reading the morning papers, then waved to his children.
Irish poet Seamus Heaney's spiritual journey could be seen as a casualty of the so-called secularising effect of the '60s and '70s. Heaney describes a shift from faith as external and ritualistic, to something more personal.
'Supernatural' rebel leader Alice Lakwena told her fighters that bullets would bounce off them and stones would become grenades when pitched at the enemy. For many Ugandans, religion was ballast against violence. For others it was an instrument of war.
'Lee and Christine Rush are your average Ozzie couple, except that their teenage son Scott is on death row in Bali having been convicted of being a hapless drug mule. It will not go down well on the streets of Jakarta if Australians are baying for the blood of the Bali bombers one month and then pleading to save our sons and daughters the next month.'
The organisers of the WYD opening mass did not attempt to integrate Australian elements into the mass, but included them as added extras. The ritual structure of the mass requires creativity to make it connect with different audiences.