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Keywords: Herod

  • AUSTRALIA

    Dodgy brothers lawmaking

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 04 April 2024

    This week, the Federal Government quickly introduced a new policy in response to a recent High Court decision that prevents them from indefinitely detaining a small number of individuals they wish to remove from Australia. 

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Tidings of joy in an ebb tide

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 19 December 2023
    3 Comments

    While a time of joy and celebration for many, Christmas amplifies hardships like loneliness and poverty for others. This year, the festive season is overshadowed by global issues such as war, climate change, and ongoing conflicts, reminding us of its origins in a period of oppression and uncertainty. 

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  • RELIGION

    The tangled strands of Christmas

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 16 December 2021
    1 Comment

    Christmas is always a mixture of nostalgia, weariness, connection and hope. This year the strands that compose it are even more tangled. We hope to return to the pre-Covid normal of celebration without anxiety. We look forward to the New Year as a gate to freedom to travel, work and plan our lives without hindrance. At the same time, however, our plans are conditional.  We realise that Covid has not left us, and that its mutations may lead to more interruptions and restrictions.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Language as an open door

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 10 December 2020
    13 Comments

    If we want to renew religious language and images we must begin with attention to the words we currently use, noticing their resonance as well as their meaning. It is then important for the language of prayer and reflection to be grounded in deep contemporary experience.

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  • RELIGION

    Don't knock secular Christmas

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 21 December 2018
    17 Comments

    The point of the involvement of God in the minute details of human life is to assert the value of the human world in all its relationships. This means that the customs and practices of our Australian Christmas should not be dismissed as a corrupted and so inferior version of the Christian celebration. They should be appreciated in their own right.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Nauru children: Why did we wait so long?

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 03 November 2018
    11 Comments

    To distant observers the hesitation and delay are hard to understand. They ask how it is possible to look on idle and unmoved at children in despair when you are in a position to address the causes of their despair. What is it that enables us to pass by damaged children, untroubled? The answer may lie in the quality of our moral imagination.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Prior to Christ

    • Aaron Lembo
    • 15 October 2018
    3 Comments

    He wandered through wilderness, dined on locust thorax and cuticle, slurped from jugs of honey and preached; to his following he said, 'The end is nigh.' He dunked their heads in rivers. At broods of vipers he screamed. He sang of another man ...

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  • RELIGION

    Pondering Palestine at a Tokyo Christmas Mass

    • Irfan Yusuf
    • 14 December 2017
    4 Comments

    Last year I spent Christmas at St Andrew's. There was incense, holy communion and a whole heap of stuff that would horrify many Sydney Anglicans. Which is their bad luck because this St Andrew's was the Cathedral Church of the Tokyo Diocese of the Nippon Sei Ko Kai. I doubt Henry VIII imagined a diocese with a name like that!

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  • RELIGION

    Food for imagination in Christmas stories and art

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 12 December 2017
    7 Comments

    The embroidery on the Gospel stories shows that, like the painter and the refugees treading through the dust and heat of the road to Egypt, God dreams of a peaceful world in which people and nature live at peace, villages are well watered, trees cared for, grapes hang in bunches, refugee children are fed, and angels help make art.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Gospel brutality reborn in our harrowing of refugee children

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 11 February 2016
    15 Comments

    The High Court decision on detention in Nauru came down just before the Christian season of Lent. It left the government free and determined to deport many young mothers and children to Nauru. For the mothers and children deportation will bring new trauma with renewed threat to their already precarious mental health. For the Australian public it again makes us ask what brutality, even to children, we are ready to tolerate. The savagery of this treatment is a suitable subject for Lenten reflection.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Gospel stories of the security state

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 17 December 2015
    19 Comments

    The pastel coloured domesticity of the images of Jesus' birth does not do justice to its context. Herod's sending out first his spies to find where the Messiah was to be born, and then his soldiers to eradicate the threat the child posed to national security, may not appear on Christmas cards, but they frame the story of Jesus' birth. The disjunction between the tenderness of the Christmas stories and the brutality of their public context is mirrored in the conflict between the humane values of the Gospel and the harsh instrumental values of the public world in any age.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The flight into Egypt

    • Grant Fraser, Anne Ramsay and Rory Harris
    • 15 December 2015
    1 Comment

    Behind them that beast of prey, that Herod, was still glaring doom from his trees of thorn, eyes bulging like a fox. And so, by night, Joseph squired their secret way, prayed the morning kind, prayed empty the brigand-haunted roads. Each day they made another cold remove, with the infant swaddled close, and their way marked by quiet nurseries of straw. Joseph kept close his thoughts, measured each horizon, always with the rumour of dark hoofbeats thrumming in his mind.

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