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Keywords: Sorrow

  • RELIGION

    Mother Merle shows me how to die

    • Barry Gittins
    • 05 June 2019
    7 Comments

    At 4am on a cold morning, my brother phoned from the hospital. My final conversation with my mother, while harrowing, was not unexpected. My attempts to thank her for who she was and what she had given to me did not suffice. Mother Merle was in a hurry to leave this life, and the cancer that had drained her strength. She was over it.

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  • RELIGION

    Can the Church survive its terminal self harm?

    • Stephanie Dowrick
    • 06 March 2019
    85 Comments

    My relationship to Catholicism can be summed up as: I am on the outskirts, yet close and invested enough to care how the Church evolves. Because, it seems to me, how it evolves and the speed at which those urgent and essential changes take place will significantly determine whether it will survive — and whether it deserves to survive.

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  • RELIGION

    On love, money and Valentine's Day

    • Barry Gittins
    • 13 February 2019
    6 Comments

    Valentine's Day is built on some fairly shaky historical ground. Rather than honouring a prelate offering bridal trysts, or hoping for a good harvest, I'm inclined to spare a thought for the Greek philosophers and poets who set up shop well before Romulus and Remus; I like to muse over their various efforts to pin down love.

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  • RELIGION

    Church reform scorecard

    • John Warhurst
    • 11 December 2018
    53 Comments

    Scoring the performance of the Australian church is a complex task at any time. Dioceses and congregations vary enormously. The mission of church agencies continues unabated in education, health, social services and aged care. But by any measure 2018 has been a big year.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Nunc dimittis

    • Anne Elvey
    • 29 October 2018
    2 Comments

    Cast the wonder of who we are — an old man, a child, their story — as if held over a font. The aged words pour like fortune over the child's head precipitating ends. A choir sings and southern crux moves across a sky above suburban light displays and lorikeets that thrive in yards.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Resignation syndrome

    • Colleen Keating
    • 22 October 2018
    4 Comments

    The concurrent symptoms for this poem: vague staring into mid air; take to their bed; not eating or drinking regularly; not toileting; not responding. Imagine a child without light in their eyes. It is not a flash back. It is now. It is the Australian people.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Giving suicide grief centre stage

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 28 August 2018
    1 Comment

    The play began in work with people who have survived suicide and who are helped to move beyond isolation and stigma by speaking about it in an encouraging environment. It helps those who watch it to break down taboos that might make them shrink from people whose relatives and friends have taken their own lives.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Returned soldiers mask sorrows with scams

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 25 July 2018
    2 Comments

    This sleight of hand from Albert sets a pattern, as the two go on to collude on an elaborate ruse, selling Edouard's designs for patriotic memorials that they never intend to build. Edouard, having plumbed the depths of opiate addiction, comes alive in the scam, a puckish schemer in a series of elaborate papier-mâché masks.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    A sweet 16th turned bitter with grief

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 25 July 2018
    8 Comments

    Today my niece would have turned 16. It would have been a milestone, the teetering point between childhood and maturity. But there was something more formidable facing her, something none of us was aware of. So unbearable and obliterating was it, it would prompt her to end her life just three months after her 15th birthday.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Portrait of a killer at school

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 27 June 2018

    My Friend Dahmer, based on the memoir by John Backderf about his teenage friendship with the soon-to-be killer, is a complex character study of which Dahmer's troubled home life, repressed homosexuality, abuse of alcohol, and experiences of bullying and social alienation are motley features rather than defining characteristics.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The crimson thread of male entitlement

    • Roanna Gonsalves
    • 09 May 2018
    4 Comments

    A thread of male entitlement binds the American literary world to a shepherd's world in India's Kashmir valley. Days ago, the American author Junot Diaz left the Sydney Writers Festival amid allegations of sexual abuse. In India there is another, more sinister and tragic manifestation, woven with the use of rape as a weapon of war.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Now that you're 12 I can't keep up

    • Jena Woodhouse
    • 19 February 2018
    1 Comment

    Fondly I remember Evie, aged approximately one, pumping her short, sturdy legs along the shore at Watson's Bay ... Now that you're 12 you lope on long, lithe legs, bronzed by the northern sun; you leap across the ballet stage in grands jetes, you dive and swim; on sports days, fleet as Atalanta, yours is the athletics track ...

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