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Keywords: Ritual

There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.

  • 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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  • INTERNATIONAL

    On the beach, in the storm

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 02 February 2021
    15 Comments

    It was all very quiet, and the waterfront was practically deserted. But I suddenly noticed a sole woman right at the water’s edge. She had her back to me, but I saw her lift what was clearly an icon, which she then venerated. I couldn’t hear her precise words, but it seemed obvious she was repeating the forms of the liturgy to herself.

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  • FAITH DOING JUSTICE

    Spirituality, leadership and social service in the church

    • John Warhurst
    • 15 December 2020
    6 Comments

    The work of Catholic social service agencies should be celebrated within the church. Its peak body, Catholic Social Services Australia (CSSA), which has been savagely cut recently, has successfully matched wits with governments for over sixty years and its member agencies continue to serve the community selflessly.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Home-ing from work

    • Tim Robertson
    • 05 November 2020

    Bosses give any number of reasons, often focused on some vaguely defined notion of productivity, why they do or don’t support remote working, but ultimately it comes down to a single, fundamental question: what is the ideal balance between reducing expenditure and surveilling workers?

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  • RELIGION

    Rediscovering sacred spaces in a pandemic

    • Eliza Spencer
    • 13 August 2020
    9 Comments

    Throughout the summer I risked smoke, storms and sickness to escape into the embrace of the sea, until, one day after that final swim, places of worship were effectively closed, along with beaches, pools, and national parks across NSW.

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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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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    That first sanctuary

    • Ian Smith
    • 21 July 2020
    1 Comment

    He enters a university library at thirty-five feeling like an imposter, rougher-hewn from suffering than most students, wrapped in an aura he thinks religious pilgrims experience shuffling along echoing naves of Gothic cathedrals, sombre, joyous.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Our not so distant past

    • Tim Robertson
    • 17 April 2020
    9 Comments

    I can’t be the only one who has, in recent weeks, found myself reaching for my dog-eared copy of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, a fictional re-telling of the 1665 great plague of London.

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  • RELIGION

    Present from afar

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 02 April 2020
    13 Comments

    One of the challenges posed by social distancing is how to reconcile personal presence with distance. Presence is tactile and up close. Measuring out the prescribed separation as people walk around the park in the early morning tends to turn familiars into strangers and greetings into distancings.

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  • RELIGION

    Farewell to a revolutionary

    • Antonio Castillo
    • 22 March 2020
    13 Comments

    Nicaraguan Ernesto Cardenal, Catholic priest, poet and revolutionary, was an essential figure of Latin American liberation theology. He died on March 1. He was 95. Cardenal’s spiritual life was the unyielding foundations of his country’s social and political struggle.

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  • RELIGION

    Altyerre-Catholicism's sacred dancing ground

    • Mike Bowden
    • 03 December 2019
    11 Comments

    This would not be accepted by the extremist Catholics who threw an Amazonian indigenous icon of a pregnant indigenous woman into the Tiber River. But the Pope is right to honour the prior religious practises of the Amazonians, just as the Bishop of Darwin supports a process that has seen the development of Altyerre-Catholicism.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Class and climate drive Melbourne Cup hostility

    • Jeff Sparrow
    • 06 November 2019
    27 Comments

    I can't imagine how anyone could look at the Melbourne Cup and see a vision of the 'fair go'. On the contrary, much hostility to horse racing — this year's Cup attracted the smallest crowd since 1993 — stems from a perception that its rituals celebrate grotesque inequalities.

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