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The papal conclave is a referendum on the Church's future
An American looks longingly on the Australian election
Are universities about to become a political priority?
The legacy of a Jesuit pope
In praise of Pope Francis
From across the Pacific, Australia’s election looks refreshingly sane: debates over fuel taxes and modest wage hikes. But the surface calm belies deeper frustrations: housing scarcity, voter disillusionment, political evasion. But for an American watching from a fractured homeland, the question is how long that difference can hold.
Three elections, three systems, one shared question: what kind of person should lead? As voters and cardinals choose their next leaders, attention turns from policy to personality — to character, courage, and conviction. In an age of division, the qualities that guide a life may yet decide the fate of nations.
Faith, once a quiet undercurrent in Australian elections, is now entangled in questions of ethnic identity, foreign policy and cultural grievance. Religion has returned to the centre of political life, only to find itself more divided, and more contested, than ever before.
In an era of reflex opinion and vanishing accountability, moral seriousness can seem an anachronism. Yet history teaches that ideas — and the people who defend them — shape lives and nations. When truth is contested and memory politicised, the measure of integrity lies not in popularity, but in the cost of conviction.
A cultural flashpoint disguised as a television drama, Adolescence has drawn comment from prime ministers and pundits, mothers and sons alike. Jack Thorne’s four-part epic, powered by Owen Cooper’s once-in-a-generation performance, turns a teenage murder accusation into both high art and a bracing reckoning with sex, violence, and the internet’s moral void.
Before heartthrobs became brand names, there was Richard Chamberlain. A matinee idol with the soul of a serious actor, he rose to fame as Dr. Kildare, sought after Shakespeare, and stole scenes from Gielgud. His legacy is a portrait of quiet yearning — for love, for truth, for artistic respect.
Despite the raging storm, I clearly see a figure on the Sea of Galilee/ a Son of Man/ with outstretched hands/ and he is calling me.
Vittorio ‘Vito’ Bianchi was small in stature, but a giant of a man who ruled over the Piccolo Bar café in Kings Cross for over 50 years. To live in the Cross meant that you knew Vittorio Bianchi. It was impossible not to.
Glide were an ’90s Australian band set for big things - a new documentary is a cautionary tale about how critical success doesn’t always translate into commercial success, and how the quest can lead to casualties along the way.
And so as the 21st century marked its first quarter, reality in the most powerful country on Earth slipped into a vortex of blurred lines of what it meant to be a living, moral being.
As Trump dismantles America’s global aid program, and Europe follows suit, developing nations are left to fill the vacuum often with partners unfriendly to Western interests. In this new geopolitical terrain, Australia faces a choice: retreat with the rest, or lead through renewed investment in aid and regional diplomacy.
What makes a war just? Can any goal justify the deaths of tens of thousands, the bombing of hospitals, the starvation of civilians? As the devastation in Gaza deepens, these questions press harder. In a conflict marked by profound suffering, what moral, legal, or human standards can still hold?
As Australia prepares to vote, the legacy of Petro Georgiou casts a long shadow, reminding us that politics can still be principled, compassionate, and deeply human. He reshaped multicultural policy, challenged cruelty, and proved that conscience has a place in party politics.
As we witness those wars that continue to rage, we might wonder, this Anzac Day, what were the effects on our First Nations people when their lands were first taken? We can now see only too clearly that it is difficult, if not impossible in the longer term, to defend one’s land when the invader has more powerful resources and shows no intention of negotiating peace.
As Australia moves through another federal election campaign, a quarter of a million new voters in the nation’s outer suburbs remain largely invisible in political discourse. These are not marginal communities in the cultural or economic sense; they are the nation’s most dynamic zones of growth, diversity, and aspiration.
As cardinals gather in Rome, they must confront declining trust, shifting global power, financial scandals, and unresolved doctrinal divides within the Church. More than a choice of leader, this moment is a reckoning with modernity and the future direction of the Church itself.
Pope Francis’ pontificate was marked not by triumph but by a humble reckoning with failure. In a Church marked by scandal, division, and decline, he didn’t reverse the tide but pointed to another measure of faithfulness: mercy over mastery, presence over power, and the courage to fail, not downward, but upward.
Francis was a pope prepared to blur the edges of doctrine, or at least its application, opening the doors of the Church to all those seeking love, mercy and forgiveness. He never doubted God’s capacity to love and forgive all who sought that love and forgiveness. He maintained the certainty, not of doctrine but of the simple piety of believers.