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Keywords: Mysticism

  • RELIGION

    Flowers for Father Rahner

    • John Honner
    • 02 April 2024
    12 Comments

    Karl Rahner, a Jesuit priest whose ideas helped modernize the Church, left an indelible legacy on contemporary Catholicism. On the 40th anniversary of his death, what can a flower left at his niche tell us about the lasting bonds between belief, memory, and the enduring search for human connection?

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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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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Why does poetry matter?

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 25 August 2022
    11 Comments

    In most circles poetry doesn’t matter. It doesn’t put bread on the table, nor raise people to revolt nor even make news unless a grizzled footballer is outed for secretly writing poems. Even in churches poems and hymns are altered to improve their orthodoxy in matters of faith, gender, race or modernity, but rarely their poetic quality.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    To live until he dies: The gift of Salman Rushdie

    • Michael McGirr
    • 25 August 2022
    4 Comments

    Salman Rushdie is a writer with a most defiant sense of humour. If you want to get to know him, I wouldn’t start with The Satanic Verses (1988), the book that has brought him so much grief. Thirty three years after Ayatollah Khomeni imposed a fatwa on the author, it would seem to have led, on August 12, to a young man called Hadi Matar making an attempt on Rushdie’s life at a public event in New York.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    A mystical intrusion in nature

    • Francine Crimmins
    • 20 November 2019
    4 Comments

    Johnson describes this encounter as one of grandeur, the same feeling some adherents of religion experience when they visit a sacred site or enter a holy place of worship. In this way, nature is a mystical experience. It's the closest feeling I get to an overwhelming presence that is all encompassing and all forgiving at the same time.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Breaking through one dimensional seeing

    • John Cranmer
    • 25 September 2019
    4 Comments

    i am a dinosaur / old fogie off with pixies / poor old dodder-bloke! / i grow wings and fly ... telling my song-story / you would put me in my box?

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  • RELIGION

    Christianity tells stories; Islam finds designs

    • Michael McGirr
    • 31 October 2018
    21 Comments

    My year ten class studies Islam, one of the most formative influences in the world that my students will inhabit and hopefully improve. I have a profound respect for Islam. Westerners often fail to acknowledge the debt they owe to Islam, a tradition that had a huge role in bringing Europe through the Dark Ages and into the Renaissance.

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  • RELIGION

    A long forgotten, misunderstood Jesuit

    • Frank Brennan
    • 12 September 2018

    This book is a warning of the terrible price we shall pay if we do not follow Pope Francis' leadership. Frank Brennan launches Anthony M. Maher's The Forgotten Jesuit of Catholic Modernism: George Tyrrell's Prophetic Theology. Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture, 11 September 2018

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  • RELIGION

    Family matters: Strengthening respectful relationships

    • Frank Brennan
    • 26 June 2017
    6 Comments

    Here in Ballarat, you know better than most other Catholics that respectful relationships in the church community have been rent asunder by the depredations of child sex offenders whose exploits went unchecked by those ordained to exercise tradition, authority, teaching and discipline. We will strengthen respectful relationships only with a voluntary commitment to truth, justice and healing — and not one forced by a royal commission or public odour. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Finding my grandfather

    • Wally Swist
    • 29 May 2017
    2 Comments

    There is the photograph of my father's father in military uniform, an Austrian, serving in the Polish cavalry in WWI, standing ramrod straight. It is he whom I think of when I find myself dowsing my genome for answers regarding my origin, the deep pull that draws me to the late symphonies of Mozart, Rilke's angelic mysticism, and, as a child, to Krapfen and Apfelstrudel ... That grandfather died shortly after returning to his farm from the results of having been a victim of a mustard gas attack in the war.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Grieving pilgrim's wild days in the wilderness

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 29 January 2015
    1 Comment

    Cheryl Strayed is haunted by her past — by her own sins, and by tragedies that have befallen her. As she walks, she hums, and the music she hears in her head leads her in and out of the past. Her solo 1600-plus km trek along America's Pacific Crest Trail is a metaphor for her life: each hardship she overcomes brings her a step closer to facing down the fierce regrets that gnash at her heels.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Quiet rage against Saudi sexist cycle

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 27 March 2014

    Wadjda is innately political. It is the first feature shot entirely in Saudi Arabia and the first to be made by a female Saudi director, and concerns itself with the pressures women experience in this rigidly patriarchal society. But it is primarily a film not about politics but about humanity. Its characters find self-empowerment and connection not in rabble-rousing but in small acts of rebellion against oppressive social norms.

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