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Keywords: Scott Stephens

  • RELIGION

    Bishop John Shelby Spong and consumer-friendly religion

    • Scott Stephens
    • 05 September 2007
    4 Comments

    Western Buddhism and Pentecostalism are sometimes criticised as self-indulgent forms of religion. Is Bishop Spong's Christian humanism any different?

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Iraq's Asia Cup victory hides reality of ungovernable society

    • Scott Stephens
    • 08 August 2007
    5 Comments

    The press coverage of Iraq’s surprise victory in the Asian Cup final was — as Ernst Bloch might have put it — full of utopian sentiment. The win was, admittedly, a remarkable achievement, but one that hardly accounted for the sheer exuberance of the outpoured emotion that followed.

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  • RELIGION

    Hitchens returns to bosom of Left to denounce God

    • Scott Stephens
    • 13 June 2007
    5 Comments

    In God is not Great, Christopher Hitchens dismisses religion as the invention of hucksters and frauds. Although he has abandoned his leftist position, this is a straightforward reiteration of Marx’s own critique of religion.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    A comfortable nation afraid to get off the couch

    • Scott Stephens
    • 05 June 2007
    3 Comments

    John Howard’s "relaxed and comfortable" approach to national life, then, was not simply a rejection of Paul Keating’s aggressive, deliberate reforms. It represented a vile pandering to our cultural inertia, an affirmation of our basest tendencies.

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  • RELIGION

    Why militant anti-theism is a God-send

    • Scott Stephens
    • 18 May 2007
    26 Comments

    The term “atheist” seems too respectable for the position occupied by commentators such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. They are anti-theists, opposed in principle to every last attachment to the divine, leading many to accuse them of a kind of inverted fundamentalism that lacks the core modern virtue of tolerance or respect for others.

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  • CONTRIBUTORS

    Scott Stephens

    • Scott Stephens
    • 17 May 2007

    Scott Stephens is a Brisbane author and theologian. He is the co-editor (with Rex Butler) and translator of the two volumes of the selected writings of Slavoj Žižek, Interrogating the Real and The Universal Exception.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The Rushdie of the West: Remembering Jean Baudrillard

    • Scott Stephens
    • 04 April 2007

    Scott Stephens on the passing of Jean Baudrillard.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The dark gospel of Martin Scorsese

    • Scott Stephens
    • 02 April 2007
    1 Comment

    Scorsese’s is a fallen world. Like Cain, his tortured characters are driven further into the wastelands – whether the desert or the untamed streets of New York – by their acts of almost mythical violence, until any remaining vestige of hope or virtue is finally extinguished.

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  • RELIGION

    What’s wrong with Voting for Jesus?

    • Scott Stephens
    • 27 February 2007
    3 Comments

    I must confess to growing bored very quickly when I hear that our real problem today is the erosion of spirituality, of belief in a deeper dimension of life, and the consequent rampant materialism. From a properly Christian perspective, the problem today is not materialism, but religion itself.

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  • RELIGION

    Capitalism's ingenious immunity to the guilty conscience

    • Scott Stephens
    • 27 February 2007
    9 Comments

    Every attempt to curb capitalism's voracious appetite, to ‘humanize’ its world-wide dominion, to place the world economy back in the service of the greater good, and thus temper its lust for unregulated growth, has not only failed, but has been assimilated.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    The fake morality of Al Gore's convenient lie

    • Scott Stephens
    • 22 January 2007
    25 Comments

    Perhaps the slick advocacy of Al Gore’s pop environmentalism is a way of baptising lives that are already excessive, self-seeking and idolatrous with a sickly green tinge. Rather than change our consumption habits, it makes us feel better about them (like drinking Diet Coke).

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  • RELIGION

    Throw out the baby, keep the bathwater

    • Scott Stephens
    • 11 December 2006
    2 Comments

    Instead of all those Baroque paintings of the baby Jesus in arms, the work of art that best captures the spirit of Christianity is arguably Andres Serrano's controversial Piss Christ.

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