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Keywords: Eyes Wide Open

  • RELIGION

    The optimism of Timothy Radcliffe

    • John Warhurst
    • 09 April 2024
    8 Comments

    Timothy Radcliffe has a hopeful vision for the Church, yet noting the slow pace of institutional change in his recent visit to Australia, he presented a sort of optimism that eschewed any hope for immediate outcomes. The basis for Radcliffe’s optimism seems to be his assumption that it is acceptable for the Church to take its time. 

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    The love of a good convent

    • Gerard Windsor
    • 16 February 2024
    1 Comment

    Casamari, my destination for the night, was fifteen kilometres more walking. The signs pointed off the road, but I must have missed one. By this time, I had wandered too far to simply retrace my steps. I was lost. To be on this walk is to convince you that Italy is composed entirely of mountains.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Did China support East Timor's independence from Indonesia?

    • Pat Walsh
    • 04 October 2023
    3 Comments

    Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao's meeting with China's President Xi Jinping signals deeper cooperation between Timor-Leste and China. This evolving alliance, closely watched by Australia, raises questions about Beijing's motives and Timor-Leste's historical indebtedness. As China expands its influence in the Indo-Pacific, Timor-Leste's diplomatic balancing act comes under scrutiny.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Take this: A story of pharmacy

    • Michael McGirr
    • 14 April 2023
    5 Comments

    What are the implications of widespread use of Metformin, Pembrolizumab, or Nivolumab, and what do they say about us? Featuring a humourless pharmacist and a thick wad of prescriptions, the story of our complicated relationship with pharmaceuticals is a meandering map of the human condition.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Life and death in the Cathedral

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 10 October 2022
    8 Comments

    Two weeks ago, Bishop Hilton Deakin died. My memories of him are inextricably tied to the Mass he celebrated in 1999 at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne, certainly the most emotionally charged event that I have seen there, following the violence orchestrated by the Indonesian military following the Referendum on Independence in East Timor. During the struggle for Independence, many East Timorese had joined the Catholic Church. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Uncle Jack Charles: A tribute

    • Arnold Zable
    • 14 September 2022
    6 Comments

    I am deeply saddened at the passing of inspirational actor, storyteller, artist, potter, musician Uncle Jack Charles. I loved him. I was one of the many who loved him. He was a gentle, loving, big-hearted man, despite it all. Because of it all. He triumphed over institutional racism, the legacy of colonialism, and the immense suffering, fragmentation, and trauma it left in its wake.

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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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  • RELIGION

    Assessing the Plenary: A work in progress

    • Geraldine Doogue
    • 15 November 2021
    61 Comments

    How do I assess our Plenary Council thus far? Or make sense of its related word-of-the-moment, synodality? With apologies to Churchill, dare I hope it is the ‘end of the beginning’? But of what precisely? A priest-friend distilled the challenge rather well last week to me: what would success look like?

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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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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The theatre of distance

    • John Allison
    • 25 November 2019
    2 Comments

    I dreamed Thoreau told me that whenever I was lost, if only I'd remember that it was not I but simply those familiar places of the world that were lost then I would realise at last the trick of standing upright here ... Everywhere, departure opens wide its gates into the nothing that awaits us in the dusk

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    This bus is a TARDIS

    • Julie Perrin
    • 19 May 2019
    8 Comments

    It wouldn't take much for an accident to happen, for things to fall apart. But today we have the kindly and calm Bus Driver. He wants the bus to do its job, to move as many people as possible on this afternoon when there is only one train line open, where the street is thick with footy crowds.

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