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Keywords: Enlightenment

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The book corner: Reappropriating stolen memory

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 16 September 2022
    1 Comment

    Joel Birnie’s short and admirable book provokes reflection both on what should have mattered in the relationships between colonial invaders and Indigenous peoples in the nineteenth century and on what matters in the relationships that constitute Australia today. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Discovery or cover-up?

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 11 August 2022
    9 Comments

    Much has recently written about the doctrine of discovery and its bearing on the treatment of Indigenous peoples, particularly in the United States where it grounded an early legal decision. The doctrine enshrined in law claims that the discovery of underpopulated and cultivated lands conferred on the discoverers the right to ownership, and was used to justify colonial occupation of territory in the Americas, Asia and Africa.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Memory and Austen

    • Juliette Hughes 
    • 14 July 2022
    4 Comments

    History is on my mind at the moment, all because of yet another awful Austen adaptation. The latest cinematic mud-pie thrown at her in the new Persuasion movie may even be the worst one yet, which is something, because there’s a lot of competition. Who can forget Gwyneth Paltrow in the 1995 Emma driving a carriage in a yellow ball gown as though she were doing the time trial in Top Gear?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The Australian love story

    • Barry Gittins
    • 15 February 2022
    11 Comments

    Did you make the annual obeisance to St Valentine’s Day traditions [read purchases] on the 14th? Last year, Australians were projected to spend $1.1 billion on Valentine’s Day gifts as St Valentine’s Day was lauded and backed by marketers, glamorising Romantic ardour and infatuation, glorious, all-consuming passion, and a thirst for intimacy and transcendence.

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  • RELIGION

    Rediscovering truth in a post-truth world

    • 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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  • RELIGION

    Hands-on faith

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 06 May 2021
    17 Comments

     The laying on of hands has been associated with controverted change in Western religious societies. Central in religious societies, it became neuralgic in cultures seeking to mark out clear boundaries between religion and such domains as politics, science and medicine and demography. To appreciate the significance of the action, it is worth reflecting on its history.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Pragmatism: obscuring ideology in Australian politics

    • Benedict Coleridge
    • 09 February 2021
    30 Comments

    The celebration of pragmatism in Australian politics obscures the role that ideology has always already played. In fact, one of the more stealthily ideological moves in Australian politics, generally made within that swirl of commitments people call ‘centrism’, is the de-politicisation of policy — the attempt to present policy as responsive to natural imperatives rather than to specific values and ideals.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Keep on walking

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 29 September 2020
    17 Comments

    Here in Greece, people seem to be smoking less and walking more. Gone are the days when long walks were measured in the time it took to smoke x number of cigarettes, the cigarettes being considered compensation for the walking, for the latter was equated with work and certainly not with pleasure. But the practice of walking can, of course, accomplish great things.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Class and COVID-19

    • David James
    • 17 September 2020
    5 Comments

    The issue of class, economic inequality, has for some time been conspicuously absent in contemporary political debate. In the wake of COVID-19, which will greatly exacerbate income and wealth disparities, such inattention must be addressed.

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  • RELIGION

    For the Life of the World: savvy and radically Christian

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 23 July 2020
    15 Comments

    For the Life of the World is recent document prepared by Orthodox clerical and lay scholars and ratified by the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople that challenges perceptions. Based strongly in the faith of the church and addressed primarily to members of the Orthodox churches, it is confident and independent in its voice and radical in many of its conclusions.

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  • RELIGION

    Dawkins delusion: the legacy of New Atheism

    • Tim Robertson
    • 27 February 2020
    16 Comments

    Contrary to their claims, the New Atheists do have a creation myth. It goes something like this: emerging from darkness into the light, Enlightenment thinkers cast off the shackles of religion and, in so doing, ushered in an age of reason. For the likes of Richard Dawkins, a founding member of the movement, this is an article of faith, and he’s spent recent years casting himself not just as an heir of this tradition, but also as its modern day guardian.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A Himalayan miracle to carry into the New Year

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 17 December 2019
    5 Comments

    Stopping along a ridge, we beheld the Garhwal Himalaya range as it came into view: a tumble of mountains crowned on the horizon by an irregular, saw-toothed range ... In that brief moment between sunrise and daylight, when a once-secretive world would be illuminated, our wonder at the world was multiplied many times over.

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