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Keywords: Benedictine

  • AUSTRALIA

    40 Days: Dignity

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 29 February 2024

    In our more routine lives, most of us have people and groups whom we ignore, we instinctively look down on and we keep away from  and people whose beliefs we scorn. We need to be attentive to the people who are commonly regarded as second-class citizens.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    An unlikely friendship: The letters of Wendy Beckett and Robert Ellsberg

    • Philip Harvey
    • 02 December 2022
    3 Comments

    Wendy Beckett and Orbis Books publisher Robert Ellsberg exchanged letters on a near daily basis during the last three years of Sister Wendy’s life. What began as a correspondence on saints evolved into a joyful and intimate exchange about the nature of love, suffering and the need for daily grace.

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  • RELIGION

    Praying for convergence?

    • Tracey Edstein
    • 14 September 2022
    6 Comments

    There is no doubt that the institutional Catholic church has lost ground in the last few decades. But unlike the institutional Catholic church, the parallel church is thriving. As people seek to engage with their beliefs and live their lives of faith more deeply, many have come to embrace a spirituality which, framed by authentic Catholic tradition, encompasses an expanded array of practices.

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  • RELIGION

    I am unashamedly pro-life, but let me tell you what that means

    • Beth Doherty
    • 19 May 2022
    10 Comments

    I have always considered myself pro-life. It’s not something I’ve felt a need to wear as a badge of honour, rather it has always been a default position. But terminology matters. Indeed, frequently, calling myself pro-life has drawn the derision or raised eyebrows of people around me, nuns and priests and radical ratbags alike, it has connotations.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The complexity of epidemics

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 22 July 2021
    9 Comments

    It is refreshing to find a work that is exploratory and invites its readers into a world more complex than they had imagined. Such a work is a recent book by Peter Dowling, Fatal Contact: How Epidemics Nearly Wiped Out Australia’s First Peoples.

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  • RELIGION

    St Benedict and communities: not to retreat from the world, but to engage deeply in it

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 15 July 2021
    14 Comments

    Benedict’s rule anticipates and handles the weakness inherent in enthusiastic movements led by charismatic leaders to leave the world. They import into the communities the power-based relationships in the world that they left.

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  • RELIGION

    Plenary Council needs the Catholic community

    • John Warhurst
    • 22 April 2021
    72 Comments

    The biggest test for the Plenary Council, now less than six months from its first meeting, is to reconnect with the Catholic community. The elongated nature of the lead up and growing apathy have made that difficult, yet it remains essential.

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  • RELIGION

    Joan Chittister's humility

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 15 July 2019
    28 Comments

    Some have portrayed Chittister as a feminist, secular warrior in religious dress. But those familiar with her writing on social, cultural and political issues recognise that it is fed by her life as a Benedictine Sister, and particularly by her deep, lived reflection on the Rule of St Benedict.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    A journey with urban refugees in Bangkok

    • Michael Kelly
    • 27 August 2018
    3 Comments

    Some days I feel like a people trafficker, though I'm not making a zack out of the trafficking. Other days I see myself as a latter-day Oskar Schindler. But mostly I just feel trapped along with the 1000 refugees and asylum seekers I'm doing my not-very-successful best to get the hell out of an open prison called Bangkok.

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  • RELIGION

    Becoming a church for mission 2030

    • Frank Brennan
    • 17 May 2017

    As the Church of 2030, we need to be more attentive to the contemplation of believers and our experience of spiritual realities, as well as the preaching of the church. Pope Francis has no time whatever for the notion of the Church as a perfect society. But, there is no way that Francis wants to abandon the ideals and the commitment to truth and justice so well exemplified by his predecessors John Paul II and Benedict.

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  • RELIGION

    Time to repeal 'ugly' Mass translation

    • Gerry O'Collins
    • 09 February 2017
    66 Comments

    It is good news that Pope Francis has appointed a commission to revisit Liturgiam Authenticam. This Vatican document, issued on 28 March 2001, provided the unfortunate guidelines that 'justified' the ugly, Latinised translation foisted on English-speaking Catholics by the 2010 Missal. I sincerely hope that Francis' commission will not merely revisit the document but strongly press for its repeal. The road will then be open to revisit the clumsy, difficult 2010 Missal and replace it.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Religion and violence in Australian-Indigenous history

    • Frank Brennan
    • 27 July 2016
    2 Comments

    The violence at the pastoral frontier of the British colonies here in Australia was all pervasive. 228 years after it commenced, we are still experiencing the after-effects. When I started advocating Aboriginal rights here in Australia almost 40 years ago, the prevailing wisdom was that the missions and missionaries were all bad news. It will come as no surprise that I have always doubted that Aborigines were well rid of religion and the missionaries in all circumstances.

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