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Keywords: Worship

  • RELIGION

    Activists strike back against the Empire

    • Sally Cloke
    • 12 December 2014
    18 Comments

    On Wednesday, 53 Christian protesters were arrested staging 'pray-in' actions at politicians' offices around the country. Eight were allegedly strip searched before being formally charged with trespass after praying in the Perth office of Foreign Minister Julie Bishop. There are echoes of martyrdom in the early church, which involved the refusal to worship the emperor. In contemporary Australia, the resistance is to the border protection regime.

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  • RELIGION

    Constitutionally Australia is a religious country

    • Kevin Donnelly
    • 03 November 2014
    29 Comments

    Unlike France, Australia's Constitution specifically accepts the place of religion in the broader society, with its reference to Almighty God in the Preamble. Its only stipulation is that governments should not privilege one religion over another, or unfairly discriminate. Moreover, our legal system and institutions might be secular in nature, but they draw heavily on Christian ethics and morality.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    If Jesus was gay

    • Barry Gittins
    • 21 October 2014
    5 Comments

    Hope for unseen vistas Peace for travelled paths. Joy for slaughtered innocence. Love for aftermath. Grace for unsought trials. Faith for visions fouled.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    What IS has to do with evil

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 02 October 2014
    27 Comments

    IS - the Islamic State - is getting a bad press. Deservedly so, for its brutality and totalitarian instincts. In the headlines, references to 'evil' and 'pure evil' have been dominant. This characterisation is unhelpful for a number of reasons. We must be careful not to empty the word 'evil' of any meaning.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    ISIS misusing ancient religious symbols

    • Irfan Yusuf
    • 22 September 2014
    21 Comments

    Today the Kalimah Shahada is being used on flags of groups whose mission is to kill Sunni and Shia Muslims. Imagine how it must feel to be a Sunni Kurd or a Shia Iraqi or an Alawi Syrian . Imagine how it must feel to be an ordinary Shia or Alawi or Sunni Australian walking around in a Sydney shopping centre and being treated by one's neighbours as an ISIS fighter.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Compassionate Jews weep for Gaza

    • Michael Trainor
    • 18 August 2014
    16 Comments

    In Australia and around the world, places of Jewish worship have been daubed with graffiti. One tag reads, 'Weep for Gaza'. In the face of the tragic loss of innocent civilian lives in Gaza, Muslims, Jews and Christians all weep for Gaza. We deplore the tagging.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Christians and Muslims exchange Middle East kindness

    • Ruby Hamad
    • 01 August 2014
    5 Comments

    As an Arab-Australian it's difficult to watch the events in Syria, Iraq and Gaza without a sense of guilt and shame. To outside eyes, it must appear that the Middle East is driven by hatred and bloodlust. In fact there is a long history of persecuted members of one Middle Eastern faith finding safety in the places of worship of those that are often cast as their enemies. This is the Middle East, at once unconscionably cruel and unbearably kind.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    South Sudan warning for Australia's hate speech champions

    • Michael Mullins
    • 28 April 2014
    9 Comments

    In South Sudan, hate speech broadcast on a local FM radio station earlier this month led to the slaughter of hundreds of innocent civilians in a massacre based on ethnicity. Local UN officials are now calling on authorities to 'to take all measures possible to prevent the airing of such messages'. Meanwhile in Australia, the Government is attempting to give legal sanction to the kind of hate speech that incited to the South Sudan massacre.

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  • RELIGION

    Faiths fight forced marriage

    • Ashleigh Green
    • 21 March 2014
    7 Comments

    This week's inauguration of Twiggy Forrest's Global Freedom Network — a large-scale interfaith initiative to end slavery — publicly recognises the importance of interfaith collaboration as a means of understanding and addressing social issues. Its launch comes not long after an Australian-first interfaith forum about the issue of forced marriage. It included Hindus, Buddhists, Christians and Jews, and discovered that forced marriage is not a Muslim issue.

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  • RELIGION

    Storm proof: good news for all seasons

    • Clare Boyd-Macrae
    • 20 September 2013
    2 Comments

    Times are no more stormy now than they have ever been. And yet there is a different quality to our storms than there has been in the past. Two things contribute to this. First: it is now a reality, even a likelihood, that we will destroy our planet. Second: we no longer have an assumed, central narrative that informs and inspires us.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Crime kids served celebrity gods

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 08 August 2013
    1 Comment

    'God didn't give me these talents and looks to just sit around being a model or being famous. I want to lead a huge charity organisation. I want to lead a country, for all I know.' In 2008–2009 a group of teenagers stole $3 million of jewellery and clothes from the homes of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and other Hollywood stars. Coppola portrays this as an outcome of materialism centred on celebrity worship.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    We're all boat people after all

    • Brian Doyle
    • 31 July 2013
    7 Comments

    Boat people, job thieves, welfare cheats — I've heard the insults, and the greed, fear and incipient blood behind those words. Rather than snarl at the crude selfishness behind our national fear of immigrants, I stare at my family annals, and read about the lanky children who came here from Ireland, utterly poor, desperately hungry, and ferociously eager.

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