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Search Results: Canopy

  • AUSTRALIA

    The ceremonious dance of freedom and tyranny

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 06 October 2022
    1 Comment

    Governments have, with little opposition, passed laws that privilege individual choice on issues related to abortion, contraception, gender equality and marriage. If we regard unrestrained individual choice as the fullest expression of human development, we shall necessarily relativise and erode social bonds.  

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Why does poetry matter?

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 25 August 2022
    11 Comments

    In most circles poetry doesn’t matter. It doesn’t put bread on the table, nor raise people to revolt nor even make news unless a grizzled footballer is outed for secretly writing poems. Even in churches poems and hymns are altered to improve their orthodoxy in matters of faith, gender, race or modernity, but rarely their poetic quality.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    April is the cruellest month

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 07 April 2022
    6 Comments

    Palm Sunday alternates between March and April. When, as this year, it is celebrated in April it keeps company with a number of days that provoke us to ask what and who matter, what and whom can you trust. If it is a cruel month, it is so because it tests, even mocks, our comfortable assumptions. In a year overshadowed by manifestations of climate change, of persistence of Covid and of the horrors of war, it is not a bad month to endure an election.

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  • FAITH DOING JUSTICE

    Best of 2021: The hollow meritocracy

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 11 January 2022
    3 Comments

    The debate about quotas based on gender has been well canvassed. The wider issues raised about merit and meritocracy, however, merit further reflection. Far in the background to both conversations lies a sophisticated body of reflection on merit among Christian theologians. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A black and blue visitation

    • Rory Harris, Grant Fraser, Lyn McCredden, Jamie Dawe
    • 08 June 2021
    2 Comments

    Into the sky, black and blue visitation by which we are blessed, or warned. Screaming like lovers en route, regal, snapping for nuts and dominance in the clattering trees.

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  • RELIGION

    Synods on synods

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 03 June 2021
    58 Comments

    At first sight the recent Vatican announcement that a forthcoming synod would be delayed was non-news. All synods are considered boring, and a synod on synodality sounds entirely self-referential. Yet the announcement was significant. The synod will take up much time and energy of Catholics at the local, diocesan, national and international level for almost three years.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Interrogating the past

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 27 May 2021
    27 Comments

    A wry satisfaction to be enjoyed in reading histories of events of your youth is that it uncovers your prejudices at that time. It reassures you that you have grown wiser but also makes you wonder whether your present attitudes will need revisiting. Save Our Sons, Carolyn Collins’ detailed and even-handed study of women’s campaign against conscription during the Vietnam War, offered such pleasures.

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  • FAITH DOING JUSTICE

    The hollow meritocracy

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 08 April 2021
    19 Comments

    The debate about quotas based on gender has been well canvassed. The wider issues raised about merit and meritocracy, however, merit further reflection. Far in the background to both conversations lies a sophisticated body of reflection on merit among Christian theologians. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Or else an eagle

    • John Allison
    • 24 November 2020
    4 Comments

    You are transfixed, steering your car but so captive to the bird’s powerful flight that you could readily follow it as it breaks away and lifts above the forest into the setting sun. Sometimes you do not want it to end. The eagle soars into the light. Away and up into the sky. And here is the corner, down towards the dirt road leading home. You are there.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Rulers in crisis

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 22 October 2020
    11 Comments

    In the choppy waters of public conversation, rulers have recently attracted much attention as they have bobbed along on its surface. This is not unusual, but in these months the attention has been more frenetic and perhaps harder to read. Whether it be Trump, Johnson, Andrews, Ardern, Berejiklian or Pope Francis, there have been unusual eddies about them that merit reflection.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Kangaroo Island paradise lost

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 22 January 2020
    3 Comments

    Turning off the main road, we burrowed now into a verdant tunnel; at the end of it stood one of Australia's flagship properties, Southern Ocean Lodge. Entering its vaulted, glass encased great room, I turned my head from the rolling waves on one side to the rolling bush on the other. Each was an ocean unto itself.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Royal visit's model for Aboriginal sovereignty

    • Dani Larkin
    • 24 October 2018
    4 Comments

    The system that keeps Aboriginal cultural autonomy oppressed calls itself representative democracy, yet our voices remain unheard. Seeing the royal couple prioritise our own land conservation more than the Australian government does is the ultimate example of how disrespected and politically powerless we are.

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