Keywords: A Century Of Influence
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ECONOMICS
- David James
- 28 October 2022
Who wields the most power in the world? If one follows the money trail, it becomes clear that Western societies have become ruled by a new type of aristocracy: a management aristocracy.
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INTERNATIONAL
- Matt Gaughwin
- 27 October 2022
3 Comments
Liberal democracies seem increasingly threadbare, insufficiently creating just outcomes for vulnerable people. We need a rejuvenation of stable and fair democracies in which integrity and trust are evident. To that end, I suggest we revisit the liberal egalitarianism of 20th century American philosopher John Rawls.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Gillian Bouras
- 11 October 2022
Jonathan Freedland’s book is an extremely harrowing tour de force: at one stage I could read only a chapter at a time. But by the end I had been reminded of the power of the human spirit, and of the way in which some people, those with a sense of mission, can endure almost any trial. Resilience is a great gift.
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INTERNATIONAL
- David Halliday, Beth Doherty, Tim Dunlop, Matthew Howard
- 26 August 2022
When former Facebook employee Frances Haugen released a trove of documents revealing internal research on the negative effects its social media products were having on mental health, the darker side of social media became hard to ignore. So how might the harmful effects of social media be mitigated into a social benefit for a saner, more coherent society?
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Gillian Bouras
- 29 July 2022
2 Comments
Daniel Mendelsohn lectures in classics at Bard College, a liberal arts institution in New York State. His retired father, aged 81 in 2011, regrets gaps in his own education, and asks to sit in on his son’s course of seminars on Homer’s The Odyssey. Professor Mendelsohn agrees, and Jay Mendelsohn joins a class of 18-19 year-olds. Later, father and son go on a cruise that retraces The Odyssey where they discover: is home a physical place, or something you carry around with you or within you?
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Andrew Hamilton
- 03 June 2022
1 Comment
As I was reading the illuminating contributions to Class in Australia I had to confront my attitudes to Marxist analysis, to the claims of sociology, social work and psychology to be sciences, to the relative importance of inequality based on wealth, gender and race, and to any claim that canonises individual choice while claiming to be value free.
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ECONOMICS
In purely economic terms, the upcoming Federal election is extremely unusual. The shut down of the Australian economy for almost two years because of health measures really has no precedent in our history. Only war can produce that type of shock. The Federal government’s financial response was as extreme as the state of emergency measures, including a sharp increase in Australian government debt. It remains to be seen, however, if the government gets much credit for injecting so much free money into the economy. It is unlikely.
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AUSTRALIA
- Kerrie Handasyde
- 03 May 2022
7 Comments
Mother’s Day was a religious event, as was the older English tradition of Mothering Sunday in which worshippers returned home to their ‘mother church’. But as this new celebration of Mother’s Day spread around the English-speaking world, it preserved in public and private ritual a particular idea of womanhood. It asserted that true womanhood was motherly.
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INTERNATIONAL
- Joel Hodge
- 25 February 2022
28 Comments
President Putin of Russia has embarked on an unprecedented military campaign in Ukraine without direct provocation or justification. In the West, there is a feeling of disbelief and confusion. How can Putin do this? And how can the Russian people accept this invasion?
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RELIGION
- Jānis (John) T. Ozoliņš
- 03 February 2022
40 Comments
As if the Covid-19 pandemic has not been testing enough, modern life has never seemed more difficult than it does at present. We are bombarded on all sides by masses of information, misinformation, expert opinions, and the relentless, strident voices of social media browbeating us into accepting the dogmatic conclusions of leading influencers.
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MEDIA
- Denis Muller
- 11 January 2022
4 Comments
The landscape has changed, and there is no going back. Individual journalists are now integrated into the ranks of pundits, urgers and persuaders who abound online. At their employers’ behest, they blog, they podcast, they ‘engage’ as the current jargon has it, with those who post comments to their articles online.
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RELIGION
- Michael Furtado
- 11 November 2021
101 Comments
Every Australian diocese and parish already has its particular subcultural identity that inflects its liturgy. Celebration, being the authentic hallmark of a liturgy that reflects identity, must keep pace with a theology that also incorporates the diverse cultural space that the young inhabit.
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