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Keywords: Sisters Of Mercy

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Searching for the truth about a wartime massacre

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 15 March 2024
    3 Comments

    Two books about a 1942 massacre of Australian nurses were released last year. One is reliable, the other is notable for factual omissions. If we leave something out, are we then guilty of censorship? Alternatively, if our truth-telling offends someone else, what is our justification for so doing?

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  • RELIGION

    What is the purpose of the RE classroom in a secular world?

    • Ann Rennie, Bernadette Mercieca
    • 09 February 2024
    5 Comments

    Today, the claims of Christianity are no longer common knowledge among a Catholic student cohort that comes from many faith traditions and none, but the Catholic school has a place for them all. Has the classroom become the ecclesial face of the Catholic Church in the 21st Century?

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Culture wars are for tin soldiers

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 02 February 2023
    6 Comments

    Any discussion of the ethics of culture war should begin with the basic reality of human communication: to flourish, human beings rely on cooperation with other people. Speaking abusively about others weakens the necessary trust that lies at the foundation of a well-functioning society and inhibits the conversation about values necessary in a humane society.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Love, mercy and schadenfreude

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 02 November 2022
    4 Comments

    The town celebrated Guy Fawkes day and burned an effigy of the man who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament centuries before. For days beforehand, even as the holy women left the churches where they had prayed for the release of souls from punishment, children would be dragging carts and prams around with Guy Fawkes dummies they’d made, stuffed with straw and newspaper like scarecrows, easy to burn.

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  • FAITH DOING JUSTICE

    The spirit of The Way

    • Michael McGirr
    • 09 September 2022
    5 Comments

    The Way had been a community of homeless people, built around difficult but wonderful characters. It taught me more than I can easily say. It was a world where things were not always as they seemed and people did not fit into little boxes. We had many challenging days and relationships with our guys were seldom easy, but there was an energy that found light in unexpected places.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    'Part of a Pacific family': Australia to re-focus aid budget

    • Joe Zabar
    • 07 June 2022
    2 Comments

    The Asia Pacific region has some of the world’s poorest and most disadvantaged communities. Supporting our regional family through increased aid and development will be important, but so too is the respect we show to the leaders of those nations which surround us. 

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Salvaging the shipwreck

    • Stephen Minas
    • 18 January 2022
    26 Comments

    During his December journey to the eastern Mediterranean nations of Cyprus and Greece, Pope Francis drew attention to the conditions for irregular migration that result in thousands drowning at sea and many more languishing for years in camps. The International Organization for Migration records 23,150 missing migrants in the Mediterranean since 2014.

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  • FAITH DOING JUSTICE

    Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 29 September 2021
    7 Comments

    In the Catholic calendar the Feast of St Francis of Assisi falls on next Tuesday. Although he gave up on wealth, power and influence Francis probably had a bigger effect on his world than any of his contemporaries. He continues to attract people to challenge the values of our society and to spark renewal in Christian institutions at the risk of going stale.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The Mercy Sisters of the Pilbara

    • Paul Cleary
    • 21 September 2021
    1 Comment

    In the late 1970s, two Mercy sisters answered a call to work with Aboriginal people, and they chose a place in the Pilbara region of Western Australia that had a notorious reputation. Sisters Bernadette Kennedy and Bernadine Daly arrived in the largely Aboriginal town of Roebourne in Australia’s north-west in mid-1978 to see if they were needed. They quickly discovered that in a town ‘awash with alcohol’ there was great need.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Funding shake-up leaves out key SA homelessness services

    • Michele Madigan
    • 13 May 2021
    9 Comments

    A state government has an obligation to do what is possible within the limits of state resources to help its people, to make the state an inclusive place where all have access to essential services and housing. However, over the last few weeks, with the announcement of the funding restructure for homelessness services, this idea of a fair go seems to have dissipated.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Locked in and locked out

    • Zaki Haidari
    • 23 March 2021
    9 Comments

    I am a refugee from Afghanistan, and I belong a minority ethnic group, the Hazaras. We have been persecuted for a long time because of our ethnicity, religion and values. In 2012, I was forced to leave Afghanistan. I was 17. Back home, my father was a medical doctor. The Taliban accused him of working with international armed forces in the country at the time. One day the Taliban took him away, and nobody has seen him since.  

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A discovery of connections

    • Najma Sambul
    • 11 February 2020
    2 Comments

    The group had come together by the chance enquiry from one churchgoer who asked another if they could dedicate time to this — to us. So, we clambered into a mini van with our meagre possessions, and the myths and half-truths we knew about Australia followed suit.

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