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Keywords: Alexander Pope

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Yellowstone and the Machiavellians

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 09 December 2022
    2 Comments

    This year I discovered Yellowstone, and my all-too-easy-breezy dismissal of the series has changed to respect and continuing interest because it has made me think about humanity and the world. It made me reflect on being human, and what (despite and often because of our best aims and intentions) we might have to do in the world to survive.

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  • RELIGION

    Doctrine of Discovery: How a papal teaching subjugated Australia’s First Nations people

    • BJ Cruse
    • 07 July 2022
    7 Comments

    The subjugation of the world’s First Nations people was enshrined in the Doctrine of Discovery, a series of papal decrees made by Pope Alexander VI in 1493, where any land not inhabited by Christians was available to be ‘discovered,’ claimed, and exploited by Christian rulers. The Doctrine of Discovery legitimised Christian explorers’ claims to land uninhabited by Christians, promoting and fortifying Christian domination, and forcing original inhabitants into Christianity. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Clive James' poetry of memento mori

    • Philip Harvey
    • 29 November 2019
    12 Comments

    Obituarists sharpened their quills in 2014 when word had it the death of Clive James was imminent. Since then we have witnessed a late flowering of poetry, reviews and articles tinged with mortality that revealed to the last his Twainian flair for journalistic self-promotion, albeit in the internet age. Now the quills are out in earnest.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The bushfires of the vanities

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 20 November 2019
    10 Comments

    The fact that they so easily turned their attention away from the lives of the people threatened by fire to brawling about their own virtues and lack of them offers little hope that the lives of Australians will count with them when they reflect on the causes and the proper response to the fires.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Trump's 1984 is Turnbull's Animal Farm

    • Brian Matthews
    • 20 February 2017
    14 Comments

    In these duplicitous times it's not surprising to find Nineteen Eighty-Four cited. In Airstrip One, WAR IS PEACE; FREEDOM IS SLAVERY; IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH - a Nineteen Eighty-Four equivalent of a Tweet with plenty of character space left to add insults. And all facts are alternative, as in the news, 'Oceania is at War with Eurasia', which becomes before your very eyes, 'Oceania has never been at war with Eurasia.' For events closer to home, Orwell's Animal Farm is disturbingly apposite.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Bishop's aid crusade must heed the poor

    • Paul O'Callaghan
    • 20 June 2014
    3 Comments

    Pope Francis and Julie Bishop both spoke this week, with passion and within days of each other, about how to address poverty in the world's poorest countries. Bishop launched a framework of new performance benchmarks, and her desire to improve accountability and transparency in Australia's aid program is to be commended. Hopefully the framework holds the voices of the poor and marginalised at its centre.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Is our morality at sea with the refugees?

    • Frank Brennan
    • 11 April 2014
    8 Comments

    'We should abandon talk of taking Australia off the table. We should also abandon talk of taking the sugar off the table. The collateral damage of that is too great. The best we can do ethically and practically is to put the sugar out of reach while leaving it on the table for those who make it here with a visa or in direct flight from persecution.' Frank Brennan contributes to a Palm Sunday panel at St Michael's Uniting Church, Melbourne.

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  • RELIGION

    Christian social thinking for Australia

    • Frank Brennan
    • 08 November 2013
    1 Comment

    'Many Catholics wonder how we can maintain our Christian faith at this time in the wake of the sexual abuse crisis and the many judgmental utterances about sexuality and reproduction. The Church that has spoken longest and loudest about sex in all its modalities seems to be one of the social institutions most needing to get its own house in order.' Frank Brennan's address to the Yarra Institute for Religion and Social Policy, 8 November 2013. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Hostages freed to forgive

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 21 August 2013
    6 Comments

    Forgiving and forgetting are weighty matters. It is unlikely, for example, that Judith Tebbutt and Nigel Brennan, both of whom were held hostage in Somalia, will ever be able to forget their experiences of prolonged isolation, near starvation, and threats of death. Yet both have achieved a kind of forgiveness via the effort to understand their captors' lives.

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  • RELIGION

    Missing Christopher Hitchens

    • Frank Brennan
    • 20 December 2011
    25 Comments

    We'll miss his intellectual rigour, self-deprecating humour, unpredictable political perspectives, unforgiving character evaluations, and iconoclastic appetite for scrutiny and transparency — even those of us appalled by his vicious and discriminatory anti-religious bigotry. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Ode to the white cuppa

    • Frank O'Shea
    • 05 November 2008
    3 Comments

    First she gave up sugar in her tea. His Catholic guilt nagged him, and he followed suit. Then came fat-free milk. There is a puritan streak in today's narcissistic culture of gyms and dieting that makes anathema many of life's little luxuries.

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  • RELIGION

    Loose reasoning on death penalty - Frank Brennan

    • Frank Brennan
    • 25 October 2007

    We think it is wrong for foreign states to impose the death penalty on Aussie drug traffickers and drug mules. But we apply different reasoning to non-Australians facing death at the hands of the state. The practical, hands on, Aussie approach often plays fast and loose with moral reasoning about what is right and wrong.

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