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Keywords: Nostalgia

  • AUSTRALIA

    Home sweet home turns sour

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 04 August 2022
    8 Comments

    It is easy to view homelessness from a distance as only a failure of economic policy and of the political responsibility to deliver material goods. A home, however, is more than a house. It connotes connections that are central to humanity. Left without a home people are deprived of more than bricks and mortar; they are diminished in their humanity.

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  • RELIGION

    When Pope Francis comes of age

    • Miles Pattenden
    • 16 December 2021
    29 Comments

    Pope Francis turns eighty-five this week. His pontificate has seen him emerge from obscurity in Argentine Church politics to become, late in life, a global cultural icon and one of the most popular popes in living memory. Over the past nine years he has invigorated the Church and, according to papal biographer Austen Ivereigh, has made the papacy ‘much more human, much more accessible, much less remote’.

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  • RELIGION

    The tangled strands of Christmas

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 16 December 2021
    19 Comments

    Christmas is always a mixture of nostalgia, weariness, connection and hope. This year the strands that compose it are even more tangled. We hope to return to the pre-Covid normal of celebration without anxiety. We look forward to the New Year as a gate to freedom to travel, work and plan our lives without hindrance. At the same time, however, our plans are conditional.  We realise that Covid has not left us, and that its mutations may lead to more interruptions and restrictions.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The first sign of corruption

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 09 December 2021
    24 Comments

    Corruption in society is a sign that respect for human dignity has been eroded. If we identify the value of human beings with their ability to compete, we are easily led to treat other people and groups in society as instruments to be used for our own gain. The result is that the integrity of public institutions and people’s trust in them are eaten away.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Tidings of comfort

    • Barry Gittins
    • 07 December 2021
    4 Comments

    Without Christmas, without that beautiful bookend of closure and celebration for another rather depressing year, where would we be? Speaking for me and mine, ensconced in the oft-locked-down leafy suburbs of Melbourne, 2021 promised much and delivered little more than a continuance of stress, bad blood among some of the tribes that comprise Victorian society, and the hope that heightened vaccination rates will translate into the need for no more lockdowns. That’s certainly a present worth unwrapping.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    I remember, I remember

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 02 December 2021
    22 Comments

    Nostalgia is the sweet and sentimental ache that we might feel for an imagined past. It distracts from the present demands of life’s journey. Despite its association with self-indulgence, however, the place of nostalgia in personal and in political life is worth revisiting.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The consolation of cosmology

    • John Allison
    • 17 August 2021

    From my third-floor hotel balcony I could reach out almost to touch the mountain. It seems such a good neighbour. When I walk out by the Li River, the mountain follows me, shadowing my footsteps. I watch the river-boats working their ways across the current towards night-moorings, the fisherman homeward-bound with his cormorants.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A very varied Christmas

    • Barry Gittins
    • 17 December 2020
    5 Comments

    What does Christmas mean for you? What does it have in store? Preceding and in the midst of the annual celebration of life and hope that is Christmas, we will always have those, as H L Mencken noted, are obsessed with the ‘haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy’.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    The reconquest of Hagia Sophia?

    • Daniel Sleiman
    • 28 July 2020
    7 Comments

    Erdogan’s announcement in relation to the Hagia Sophia is one that is heavily influenced and panders to his Islamist sentiments and supporters. Hagia Sophia, often touted as the pinnacle of Byzantine church architecture and design, was reverted to a museum in 1935 by the founder of the modern Turkish republic, Kemal Ataturk. Altering its status to a mosque is clearly about propping up Erdogan’s Islamist credentials and base, which have slowly been eroding civil freedoms in the Turkish nation.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Back to business as usual

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 07 May 2020
    5 Comments

    For comfortable communitarians among us it is tempting to lament the loss of the solidarity displayed in the first response to coronavirus. That would be a mistake. Solidarity is not a mood to be looked back on with nostalgia, but a commitment to be built and defended.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The days of the week

    • Philip Harvey
    • 20 April 2020
    4 Comments

    Reports of the rain are weak front, then strong. Sunshine headline news, or so it appears. I whisper the tune from a scratchy disc. Maybe Tuesday will be my good news day.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Pro bono prodigal

    • Ian C. Smith
    • 15 July 2019
    4 Comments

    Wandering out of sorts around the lake, my thoughts backward now there is more past than future, I see a boy and girl on a school day wearing uniforms I recognise from when my son arranged his to resemble the garb of an urchin.

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