Keywords: Charles Dickens
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EDUCATION
- Gillian Bouras
- 31 October 2017
9 Comments
American-British writer Amanda Foreman is campaigning to return authors such as Austen, Dickens and Eliot to curricula in famous schools. But teachers have told her that a generation reared on smartphones and iPads finds such authors too ‘difficult'. So what? is my inward cry.
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AUSTRALIA
- Gillian Bouras
- 21 April 2017
16 Comments
Every Anzac Day there seem to be arguments about the legitimacy of what has been called the One Day of the Year. In the past I have taken my turn at rebutting views that express the belief that such days are part of a wholly reprehensible glorification of war. I've had a great deal of time to think about the matter, and also have a personal involvement: my grandfather and father were in the Australian Army, and both saw active service, about which periods they hardly ever spoke.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Gillian Bouras
- 04 April 2017
6 Comments
Small wonder there is a particular surge of interest in dystopian novels: many people feel times have never been so troubled or so complicated, although I remember my father pointing out that people felt the same when the longbow and later gunpowder were invented. Amazon recently reported that Orwell and Huxley are selling like hot cakes. This at a time when certain purveyors of doom are lamenting the fact that 26 per cent of Americans, for example, did not read a single book during 2016.
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AUSTRALIA
- Kate Galloway
- 26 August 2016
15 Comments
Oliver Twist is still used to aid understanding of the trauma arising from poverty, and the suffering of children at the hands of individuals and within institutional settings. In broader Australian society we assume Dickensian attitudes to children have evolved. Aligned with the sentiments behind child protection, society's image of children and childhood is idyllic. Yet beneath this veneer lies a substratum of deeply ambivalent, even malevolent, attitudes towards children with a distinctly Dickensian flavour.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- P. S. Cottier
- 27 May 2014
2 Comments
mona lisa with monobrow, smiling past watchers as she spots the gay god, the god who goes down, sweet curser of figtrees, just to perplex theologists.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Gillian Bouras
- 30 April 2014
8 Comments
While Dickens, staunch champion of the poor and of children, reportedly hoped that A Christmas Carol might encourage the restoration of social harmony, his narrative line can also be seen as a convenient plot device. It is a deeply Christian story, not just about Christmas, but about life itself, about actions and their consequences, the need for wrongs to be made right, and the desire for hope and potentiality of renewal.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Ellena Savage
- 13 January 2014
2 Comments
The pleasure of not affecting one's native mode of speech to appease a kind of person who means to privilege the privileged, is unparalleled. Try speaking in a playful way to someone who's scared of bimbos, and then watch their brains literally explode. When a listener struggles to understand that when I say I 'literally died', and yet clearly am still alive, that I am using language in a playful and even ironic way, it's not really their fault.
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RELIGION
- Andrew Hamilton
- 19 December 2013
14 Comments
Christmas tells the story of a God who entrusted Christ as a baby safely to the care of Mary and Joseph in a markedly hostile secular environment. The stories told at the Royal Commission are of parents who entrusted their children unsafely to the care of representatives of the Church. The face of Herod in our day is not that of a persecutor who threatens the church from without. It is that of a minister of the church who betrays from within.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Barry Breen
- 18 December 2013
11 Comments
Santa walks into a bar and the barman says: Sorry, we're claused. If sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, then punning must have a reputation almost as undesirable. A joke that can be greeted only with a groan can hardly be a real joke now, can it? But punning has a rich history. It graces the pages of the greatest of writers. And when it comes to puns, subeditors responsible for article headings believe themselves to be a race apart.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Ellena Savage
- 27 September 2013
6 Comments
The pleasure of not affecting one's native mode of speech to appease a kind of person who means to privilege the privileged, is unparalleled. Try speaking in a playful way to someone who's scared of bimbos, and then watch their brains literally explode. When a listener struggles to understand that when I say I 'literally died', and yet clearly am still alive, that I am using language in a playful and even ironic way, it's not really their fault.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
And in the raucosity of blogs, the avidity of trolls, the ubiquity of porn, the vidvidvidity of tubes, the facebookery of profiles, the aviary of twittervation — can the mind still find that space to stretch itself?
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RELIGION
- Michael Kelly
- 27 November 2012
77 Comments
Rome is seen to be out of touch with the membership. Local bishops often behave as branch managers of a poorly administered, centralised multinational corporation. Royal Commission notwithstanding, there won't be healing of the community of faith until there is systemic change.
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