Keywords: Despair
There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
The fish, ferocious like the eerie bird … challenges me to take it out of the water. … The thought of chucking it down from the heights, and sinking it into the unknown abyss, causes me to break out in a cold sweat. … Its mouth open … as if it had broken its vocal cord, reminding me of one night, when a kid, lost on the road, was crying, imperceptibly, in the darkness, half-visible, walking alone.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Nola Firth
- 04 November 2014
7 Comments
Great ox, your shoulders, rump, are dark inked and centre stage. But your horns, clear pointed, are mere memories of anger's mark... You no longer snort and stamp, your eye looks shy and hushed
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Kristy Chambers
- 08 October 2014
8 Comments
I attempted to manage my mental health with good intentions, stern self-talk, guilt and cigarettes. Finally, exasperated and desperate, I started taking an anti-depressant medication, and when it actually worked, I was stunned to feel happy. But like any new relationship, the honeymoon period is brilliant... and temporary.
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RELIGION
- Kevin Donnelly
- 28 August 2014
34 Comments
Growing up in working class Broadmeadows in a Housing Commission estate with a communist father and a Catholic mother – mass on Sunday and the Eureka Youth Movement on Tuesday – taught me first hand about two of the most influential and powerful forces of the 20th century.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Paul Scully
- 19 August 2014
2 Comments
Outside rituals, the salvation of small actions behind closed doors like the spider, my childhood friend, the silence returns, the woods of earlier times thin around me, my own tree shrinks back to its roots.
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AUSTRALIA
- Michael Trainor
- 18 August 2014
16 Comments
In Australia and around the world, places of Jewish worship have been daubed with graffiti. One tag reads, 'Weep for Gaza'. In the face of the tragic loss of innocent civilian lives in Gaza, Muslims, Jews and Christians all weep for Gaza. We deplore the tagging.
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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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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Megan Graham
- 07 August 2014
2 Comments
Broken and bruised by their respective journeys, Gretta and Dan seize the chance for solidarity. For both, their sense of compassion and resilience allows them to navigate a cold and indifferent New York City that threatens to swallow them whole. They use the creation of music as a mirror to reflect back a version of themselves – and NYC – that they can love.
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AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 17 July 2014
14 Comments
My response to government reports is often like that of a small boy watching a magician. You know that a rabbit will be produced out of the hat, but you can’t quite work out how it will be done. For a Government set on cutting costs the McClure report into Australia's welfare system will be easy to cherry pick by further depriving the already deprived. The risk is that it will not pull a white rabbit out of the hat, but a ferret.
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INTERNATIONAL
- James O'Brien
- 02 July 2014
6 Comments
FIFA World Cup Brazil 2014 is in the knockout stages. Brazil’s team is through to the quarter finals, much to the joy and delight of home fans. Yet to what extent can Brazilians actually celebrate? The tournament has come at much social and economic cost.
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AUSTRALIA
- Kerry Murphy
- 17 June 2014
11 Comments
In October 2013, Jesuit Fr Frans van der Lugt wrote about the suffering of the besieged people of Homs in Syria: 'Despite these difficulties, we keep grasping onto hope.' On 7 April 2014 he was executed outside his home. The rout of Iraqi forces in Mosul by the extremist Islamic State of Iraq and Levant must be a worry to the Iraqi authorities and the US and Western countries that have invested so much in the new post Saddam Iraq.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
- 06 June 2014
2 Comments
When journalist and activist Barbara Ehrenreich was a young woman she came face to face 'with something vast, terrifying and unknowable'. We mustn't take for granted the courage this admission took coming from such a committed atheist. While noting science can 'dismiss anomalous 'mystical' experiences', she wrestles her discontent into submission by boldly declaring that it 'is not unscientific to search for what may not be there'.
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