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Keywords: Autobiography

  • AUSTRALIA

    Like the dewfall

    • Michael McVeigh
    • 24 November 2023
    2 Comments

    Australia's victory in the 2023 Cricket World Cup in the face of India's home advantage is a tale of unexpected triumph. This victory goes beyond cricket, illustrating how small factors can drastically influence outcomes, leading to greater lessons on resilience and the surprising nature of grace.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    An unlikely friendship: The letters of Wendy Beckett and Robert Ellsberg

    • Philip Harvey
    • 02 December 2022
    3 Comments

    Wendy Beckett and Orbis Books publisher Robert Ellsberg exchanged letters on a near daily basis during the last three years of Sister Wendy’s life. What began as a correspondence on saints evolved into a joyful and intimate exchange about the nature of love, suffering and the need for daily grace.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Uncle Jack Charles: A tribute

    • Arnold Zable
    • 14 September 2022
    6 Comments

    I am deeply saddened at the passing of inspirational actor, storyteller, artist, potter, musician Uncle Jack Charles. I loved him. I was one of the many who loved him. He was a gentle, loving, big-hearted man, despite it all. Because of it all. He triumphed over institutional racism, the legacy of colonialism, and the immense suffering, fragmentation, and trauma it left in its wake.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Is social media harmful? A Roundtable

    • 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

    The book corner: Beyond belief

    • Barry Gittins
    • 12 August 2022

    Journalist and author Elle Hardy spent 15 months researching and writing her 2021 work Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity is Taking Over the World. She notes the estimation that by 2050, one billion people around the world (one in 10 humans) will be a Pentecostal follower of Jesus (and their pastor).

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Wit, irony and the Australian vernacular: Remembering Brian Matthews

    • John Schumann
    • 15 June 2022
    4 Comments

    Most of us, when pushed, can name a couple of teachers who had a profound influence on our lives. For me, Brian Matthews was one such teacher. I enrolled in English at Flinders University in 1972. On asking the enrolling officer whether anybody was ‘doing anything about Lawson’, I was directed to the office of Brian Matthews, a recent appointment to the English Department. ‘I hear you know something about Lawson,’ I said, leaning in his doorway.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The normality of Olympic brutality

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 28 February 2022
    7 Comments

    For anybody surprised about those ‘marquee tent’ moments, as an ABC journalist crudely termed them, the Olympics is as much about torment as it is about achievement. The torment is very much reserved for the athlete, the achievement reserved for officialdom and media and spectator consumption. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The Mercy Sisters of the Pilbara

    • Paul Cleary
    • 21 September 2021
    1 Comment

    In the late 1970s, two Mercy sisters answered a call to work with Aboriginal people, and they chose a place in the Pilbara region of Western Australia that had a notorious reputation. Sisters Bernadette Kennedy and Bernadine Daly arrived in the largely Aboriginal town of Roebourne in Australia’s north-west in mid-1978 to see if they were needed. They quickly discovered that in a town ‘awash with alcohol’ there was great need.

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  • RELIGION

    St Ignatius Loyola and the midlife journey

    • Gerald O'Collins
    • 20 May 2021
    24 Comments

    Over forty years ago I drew on the doctoral work of Bridget Puzon to produce The Second Journey and reflect on midlife journeys. Human history, as I realised then and later, throws up everywhere examples of such journeys: from Abraham and Sarah to Moses, from Paul of Tarsus to Mother Teresa of Calcutta, from Dante Alighieri to Eleanor Roosevelt, from John Wesley to Jimmy Carter, from John Henry Newman to Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Finding fragments of a father

    • Brian Matthews
    • 02 July 2020
    3 Comments

    Daddy Cool is a thoroughly absorbing biography, witty, astonishing, often intensely moving, effortlessly in charge of a crowded and potentially confusing canvas (readers of a certain age will recognise names like Jack Davey, Roy Rene, Dick Bentley, Willie Fennell).

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Going big picture with Malcolm Turnbull

    • Barry Gittins
    • 22 May 2020
    17 Comments

    As the small-l Liberal who attempted unsuccessfully to stare down the right-wing of the Liberal Party, known to his enemies as ‘Mr Harbourside Mansion’ or as the best Labour Prime Minister to ever lead the Liberal Party (2015-2018), Malcolm Bligh Turnbull was a man who dreamed, spoke and spent big.

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  • MEDIA

    Looking back on Alan Jones

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 15 May 2020
    12 Comments

    Alan Jones has never shied away from controversy. Relentlessly pounding various positions for decades, he has remained, till his recent announcement that he would be retiring, immoveable. He ducked accusations; he prevailed in the face of storms and juggernauts. At Sydney radio station 2GB, he maintained a degree of authority from the fear of politicians.

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