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Keywords: Loneliness

  • RELIGION

    Journalist learns the power of accompanying

    • Julie Perrin
    • 17 April 2019
    14 Comments

      At Adelaide Writer's Week, George Megalogenis asked Leigh Sales who had surprised her most in the research for her book Any Ordinary Day. She replied: 'Steve Sinn, the priest. I'm not religious and I felt like we were going to have nothing in common and his way of looking at the world wouldn't make sense to me.' How wrong she was.

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  • RELIGION

    Sexual abuse summit: naive no more

    • Tracey Edstein
    • 18 February 2019
    28 Comments

    My hope is that the summit will recognise that the hierarchical nature of the institutional church, and its corollary, clericalism, is the biggest stumbling block to making the church not merely a safe place for all, but the welcoming, compassionate, open community it is intended to be.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The myth of polarisation in modern Australia

    • Jeff Sparrow
    • 10 December 2018
    12 Comments

    Why do so many pundits decry the divisions in Canberra at a time when, objectively speaking, the parties have never been closer? The short answer is that they're responding to a genuine polarisation — not between Labor and Liberal but between both parties and the rest of society.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Kerryn Phelps' middle-class populism

    • Osmond Chiu
    • 05 December 2018
    4 Comments

    At first glance, the move towards electing independent MPs seems to be a repudiation of attempts to mimic right-wing populism and a vote for small l liberalism. But it shares more with populism than many care to admit.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    The implications of loneliness

    • Tim Robertson
    • 19 November 2018
    14 Comments

    Loneliness is framed in a quintessentially liberal way: as a health-related issue affecting individuals. But loneliness is a by-product of the liberal social order; by elevating the market above all else and reducing notions of freedom to individual rights, notions of value are now boiled down to crude forms of economic reductionism.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Waking up to homelessness

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 19 October 2018
    11 Comments

    In London of the 1990s, I observed people sleeping under bridges, on doorsteps, in cardboard boxes. How they survived the winters, I never knew, and I suppose many didn't. Since the beginning of Greece's financial crisis in 2008 and the influx of refugees from the Middle East, similar scenes can now be seen in Athens.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Among the ghosts of Chernobyl

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 15 August 2018
    5 Comments

    The earthworms and bees were the first to know, wrote Nobel laureate and Belarusian native Svetlana Alexievich. The bees stayed in their hives; the worms buried themselves so deep that fishermen digging for bait on the banks of the Pripyat River were perplexed that they couldn't find any. The humans were slower to learn.

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  • RELIGION

    Freedom from the tyranny of doing

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 06 February 2018
    12 Comments

    The human brain has always needed silence, and there have always been people who needed solitude, at least for certain periods. In 1948 war hero and adventurer Patrick Leigh Fermor retreated to a French monastery simply in order to write. But the experience of silence was an unexpected bonus.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Stranger Things' trip through the mental illness Upside Down

    • Cassandra Golds
    • 27 October 2017
    2 Comments

    As the credits came up, my companion looked at me and said, 'Scary.' I turned from the screen and shook my head. My voice wouldn't quite come. 'Life,' I said. It was the character of Joyce Byers who most captivated me. I, too, have been so anxious that I forgot how I looked to other people.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Alienation and angst in the age of Instagram

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 25 October 2017
    1 Comment

    On the face of it, it's a cautionary tale against relying on social media as a source of relationships and self-identity. That's a fairly retrograde take-home though, and the film is actually more than that; it's an exploration of loneliness and isolation that is universal despite a context that is very much of this moment.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Crude beauty of a Yorkshire shepherd's gay awakening

    • Megan Graham
    • 31 August 2017
    4 Comments

    The UK's Yorkshire moors seem like an ideal setting for a crude yet beautiful film about two shepherds falling in love. What's even better is a director bringing to the film his own history of such a place, adding the depth of familiarity with both the land and those who live off it. Such is the case with one-time Yorkshire farm boy Francis Lee's directorial debut, God's Own Country.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Libraries adapt to the age of free information

    • Neve Mahoney
    • 06 July 2017
    6 Comments

    I often visit my local library. I tend to go in the after-school hours, so there are children everywhere. I can see mothers guiding young, chubby hands across picture book pages. I think of Mem Fox's advice about how children should hear a thousand stories before learning to read. With the internet and ebooks, the free information that made a library unique is no longer exclusive. Classic literature can be found with a Google search. So what do brick and mortar libraries offer that Amazon can't?

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