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Keywords: Earth Hour

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    My life as a Florence tour guide

    • Benedict Coleridge
    • 22 August 2012
    6 Comments

    All is not quite lost. There's still Michelangelo's David in the Academia — that's 'famous' and always makes for a good Facebook album cover. But after queuing for two hours, you feel rather underwhelmed — David isn't the 20m high statue of a ripped male you had been expecting, and there isn't a secret passageway leading from his gluteus maximus to a torture chamber beneath the Vatican.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The eloquence of God

    • Brendan Byrne
    • 04 July 2012
    2 Comments

    'And the Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us, and we saw his glory, full of grace and truth' (John 1:1, 14). In the second-last conversation I had with Peter, we agreed that that text should be the Gospel for his Requiem. There is a sense, I’m sure, in which every poem that Peter wrote was an instance of the Word becoming flesh.

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  • RELIGION

    Making friends not foes of rights and religion

    • Frank Brennan
    • 13 September 2011
    5 Comments

    The Church of the 21st century should be the exemplar of due process, natural justice and transparency. While there can be little useful critique of the final decision of Pope Benedict to force the early retirement of Bishop Bill Morris, there is plenty of scope to review the processes leading up to it.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Book junkie's detox nightmare

    • Brian Matthews
    • 02 September 2011
    7 Comments

    My wife and I are performing a difficult, heart-rending task: culling our books. There are thousands of them, on shelves and in boxes, some of which were sealed and labelled 25 years ago. I know who to blame for setting me on the path to this agonising task. It was Mrs Murphy.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Best of 2010: Don't wimp out at the ballot box

    • Edwina Byrne
    • 07 January 2011
    5 Comments

    It would be easy to cast a donkey vote or a vote for a minor party and to thus wash your hands of the responsibility for our governance for the next three or so years. In a representative democracy, a vacuous election represents a lazy polity.

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  • RELIGION

    The rise of Catholicophobia

    • Paul Collins
    • 17 September 2010
    39 Comments

    It's not that Catholicism has nothing to answer for, but the problem is that caricatures quickly become facts. Many Catholics have learned to 'cop it sweet', but there comes a point where you have to say something. The papal visit to the UK might just be it.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Don't wimp out at the ballot box

    • Edwina Byrne
    • 20 August 2010
    22 Comments

    It would be easy to cast a donkey vote or a vote for a minor party and to thus wash your hands of the responsibility for our governance for the next three or so years. In a representative democracy, a vacuous election represents a lazy polity.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Tales from the kingdom of force

    • Ben Coleridge
    • 16 August 2010
    2 Comments

    Flicking the frisbee with a well practised arm, Jimmy told me about his former home in Sri Lanka. 'Last time I was there, I was carrying bodies to their graves in my arms, even the bodies of friends.' Homer's Iliad is a poem of force in which, at all times, the human spirit is shown modified by its relations with force.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Gillard sustains population myth

    • Ruby J. Murray
    • 01 July 2010
    24 Comments

    I don't know about you, but last time I got on an outrageously late, over-crowded train at peak hour full of apparently longstanding Aussies in business suits, the first thing I thought was: I really wish Australia accepted fewer immigrants.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Iceland's ash cloud of the apocalypse

    • Brian Matthews
    • 19 May 2010
    9 Comments

    If Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano erruption was disruptive, its cousin Katla may have worse in store. Volcanoes, emanating a kind of preternatural, primal, patience, are landlords whose unchanging message is: you are renting; you haven't bought.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Possibility springs in Russian winter

    • Ben Coleridge
    • 22 April 2010
    5 Comments

    Winter in the Russian industrial city of Yaroslavl has been hard since the Global Financial Crisis. The 'contract' between Russia's elite and ordinary Russians, whereby the latter sacrifice their civil and political rights for economic wellbeing, is not delivering.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Not-quite-right freedom from hunger

    • Anthony Lynch
    • 06 April 2010
    3 Comments

    He walked with his back hunched, his lowered head inches above his toes. As if he feared cavities or his own anonymity. That black dog stopping at every fence post.

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