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There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
The pandemic has afforded us a preview of how a crisis plays out when the science is not properly heeded. The overwhelming majority of climate scientists have long been sounding the alarm that the health and safety of large parts of the population are at serious risk, both here and around the world. We are already seeing the damage to health and to the environment that they predicted.
Whereas the Vatican II document sought to engage with, and to respect, the autonomy of the modern world and its science, only too many of the Vatican’s official statements over the past fifty years have effectively resiled from that commitment.
While I was musing I heard scratching noises, faint, bothersome, at the mind’s edge, rather like mice nibbling and scuttling, or polter-somethings working through the ceiling. Then my nostrils tingled — hints of a smell, or one remembered or imagined.
During times of crisis concepts such as power and liberty are often brought into the light and re-examined, and it is a sad fact that during those same times, people in power often try to chip away at liberty, at democracy’s most basic freedoms: several current world leaders immediately spring to mind.
All this is pleasant and unremarkable, except that we were just briefly discussing which future events are likely cancelled in light of the announced pandemic. It’s an unexpected morning topic for conversation before coffee. But it’s appropriate with the increasing concerns on flattening the curve of contagion, illness, infections, acute complications and death.
Cardinal Sarah's scandal-causing book arguing against changes to the rule of mandatory celibacy was a transparent attempt to thwart proposals coming out of the Amazonian Synod of 2019. Whatever the fallout, it should not be allowed to scare Australia's bishops off from discussing the subject during Plenary Council 2020.
Dad is out watering the garden, but all the front windows are open, so he can hear the piano and his wife and two daughters singing. He often hums along to our repertoire, which is a mixture of Anglo-Celtic songs, Australian numbers — and, memorably, 'Lead, Kindly Light', written by the recently canonised St John Henry Newman.
Of English saints the newly canonised John Henry Newman is the most intellectual and active in public life since Thomas More. When conversation turns to faith it is common to regard the gift of finding good words as no more than a decoration on the hard reasoning that faith demands. Newman stands as a reproach to that view.
Wandering out of sorts around the lake, my thoughts backward now there is more past than future, I see a boy and girl on a school day wearing uniforms I recognise from when my son arranged his to resemble the garb of an urchin.
Among writers familiar in Australia who write in this vein are Michael McGirr, Terry Monagle and the much missed Brian Doyle. Their writing does not merely describe but evokes and creates a world, and shapes a human response that respects its variety and mystery. These qualities are evident in Julie Perrin's Tender.
I've recently been reading about people who disconnect in radical ways, or else manage a balancing act between connection with society and disconnection. The recently deceased Sister Wendy Beckett was one such. So too is Brother Harold Palmer who, like Sister Wendy, began his seclusion in a caravan.
Mary Oliver, who died recently, came to realise it's not just kneeling and kissing the ground that needs to be encouraged, but that the natural world itself, which fed and sustained her creatively and emotionally for a lifetime, is now endangered. We are in danger of wrecking creation.
37-48 out of 200 results.