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Keywords: Hitler

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Patterns of war and peace

    • Barry Gittins
    • 13 October 2022

    Why is it that we so often don’t learn from the last war’s mistakes? Time and again, humans are drawn into patterns of behaviour that echo those of the past, and that lead once again to armed conflict. It's too easy to shy away from examining the moral failure that is war. When we eulogise the fallen, do we forget why they were butchered in the first place?

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Speaking truth to power: In conversation with Tim Costello

    • Barry Gittins, Tim Costello
    • 07 October 2022
    1 Comment

    Reverend Tim Costello's informal status as a nagging conscience to many Australian governments, including the Howard government in which his brother Peter served as federal treasurer, was formally acknowledged when the National Trust of Australia chose him as a ‘National Living Treasure’. Barry Gittins speaks to Tim Costello about the nature of power, and its place and exercise in public life.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Pacifism and Putin

    • John D’Arcy May
    • 28 September 2022
    2 Comments

    What can the pacifist do when confronted with naked tyranny? With Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, pacifists are faced with the dilemma of either helping Ukrainians defend themselves ― and what spirit and courage they have shown, led by their unlikely president ― or letting Putin have his way. If diplomacy stood a chance, it would be the alternative option for pacifists; but does it?

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Democracy – Fraternity = Catastrophe

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 15 September 2022
    3 Comments

    To say that democracy is under threat is now a truism. And to sustain democracy is a complex task. People need to believe in it and experience its benefits. This demands a deep grounding, founded on our shared human dignity and on our shared responsibility to shape our own lives within the community on which we depend.

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  • RELIGION

    War, truth and Christianity

    • Peter Vardy
    • 21 July 2022
    3 Comments

    Pope Francis recognised that Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine was ‘perhaps somehow provoked’ and said he was warned before the war that Nato was ‘barking at the gates of Russia’. In an interview with the Jesuit magazine La Civiltà Cattolica the Pope condemned the ‘ferocity and cruelty of the Russian troops’ but warned against a fairy tale perception of the conflict as good versus evil.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    A pro-life crossroads in Australian politics

    • Michael McVeigh
    • 15 June 2022
    4 Comments

    One would assume that the Victorian Liberal Party has looked at the numbers, and believes that religious conservatives no longer make up a significant proportion of their constituency. Certainly, the moral authority of the Catholic Church and other Christian denominations has taken a battering in the state over the last decade, with many remaining openly hostile to religious perspectives. If the pro-life movement was ever a significant force in Australian politics, that’s no longer the case.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    In the name of Kyrill

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 31 May 2022
    4 Comments

    Patriarch Kyrill of Moscow has received much justified criticism for aligning his Church alongside Vladimir Putin in the invasion of Ukraine. If we are to understand how he could think it is right to do so, however, it is helpful to know how he came to be Kyrill. The story of his earlier namesakes illuminate the conduct of the present Patriarch of Moscow. 

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Stalin’s patriarchate

    • Stephen Minas
    • 23 May 2022
    2 Comments

    ‘We removed him from the mausoleum’, wrote the Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. ‘But how do we remove Stalin from Stalin’s heirs?’ The poem was published in 1962 but it’s still a good question. Today one of Stalin’s heirs commands a barbaric war against Ukraine with the enthusiastic cheerleading of another such heir – the leader of the Moscow Patriarchate reestablished by Stalin.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Power but no glory

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 31 March 2022

    People who understand more about international affairs than I do tell me that the Ukrainian/Russian matter is complex, but to me the matter seems simple enough, involving the obsessions of a powerful man, and the suffering of an innocent population. As usual, it is the women and the children who are bearing the brunt of the conflict, while President Putin remains supremely indifferent to their fate. And, as so often, I wonder what makes him tick.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Does the 'Let it Rip' approach have a eugenics problem?

    • Justin Glyn
    • 27 January 2022
    10 Comments

    In the early part of the twentieth century, Francis Galton (a cousin of Charles Darwin) used the latter’s work to argue that human breeding stock could be improved. He would weed out the weakest and the less able and produce a sturdier race. Until recently, the crematoria of Hitler’s death camps were enough to remind most that this was not an idea consonant with actual human flourishing.

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  • RELIGION

    Assessing the Plenary: A work in progress

    • Geraldine Doogue
    • 15 November 2021
    38 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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  • AUSTRALIA

    Gone to graveyards every one

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 10 November 2021
    11 Comments

    Aficionados of United Nations Days and Weeks will know that this is the Week of Science and Peace. In the middle of it, perhaps deliberately and certainly paradoxically, sits Remembrance Day. Initially called Armistice Day, it marked the end of the First World War and of the industrial scale killing involved in it. The events of 1918 and what they might say about the relationship between war and science merit reflection today.

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