Keywords: What Is Forever
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AUSTRALIA
- Catherine Marshall
- 03 June 2019
25 Comments
When Melburnian Courtney Herron was murdered, the topic of male violence started trending. In one of the most incisive comments on what is an all-too-frequent occurrence, Victoria's Police Commissioner Luke Cornelius said it was time for men to start taking responsibility for the violence. Men — not all men, but many — took umbrage.
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INTERNATIONAL
- Andrew Hamilton
- 17 October 2018
4 Comments
The charge brought against Kavanaugh invites reflection on what past actions and allegations should disqualify a person from holding public office. And in a society where increasingly traces of our past actions will be indelibly recorded, what scope should there be for remission and wiping the slate clean of past offences?
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RELIGION
- Ben Pobjie
- 03 August 2018
46 Comments
I am not a fan of Christianity. For years I have been what some might call a 'militant atheist': the type who is far more likely to catalogue the pitfalls of faith than to highlight the benefits. But more and more I am enamoured of one element of Christianity that I consider its most striking, and most laudable, feature.
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RELIGION
- Rachel Woodlock
- 15 June 2018
14 Comments
Amid the shock and grief for Anthony Bourdain's death, one blue-tick Twitterer attempted to capture five minutes of shameful fame, declaring that religious people believe hell or purgatory is his afterworld destination. While all the great religious traditions generally proscribe suicide, they also contain nuanced views of the suicide's fate.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Carolyn Masel
- 07 May 2018
Early traumas last, the experts say ... but memory can resemble an old wound that presages damp days or, like a sharp new line, make one gasp again. What violence do they endure who with nightmare slowness flee a wolfish past? And are theirs unexamined lives who have attained the modern armour-plated dream?
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RELIGION
- Frank Brennan
- 03 April 2018
2 Comments
'What would it mean for any of us to be wishing Steve Smith and David Warner a happy and blessed Easter?' Easter Homily by Fr Frank Brennan SJ at the churches of Adamaniby and Nimmitabel, Easter 2018.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Anuforo Goodluck Eziokwu and D. G. Yntiso
- 05 February 2018
1 Comment
To make a choice is one hard nut. To decide and stand, to point and dot ... What they will do with what they were given? See their pride and their selfish dictations. See them leave us in hell while they are in heaven, living the life and leaving us to die.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- N. N. Trakakis
- 18 September 2017
1 Comment
We do not know what we want. And we do not want what we know. Like shadows hanging in the air, their threads of reality unravelling, absenting themselves from the world. She said time erases life. He said let's be timeless. She said it would be dark. He said he hated daylight. She said it would be lonely. He said he prostituted his mind talking to people. She said he is mad. He said may God preserve him from sanity. She said: God will. And God did.
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RELIGION
- Frank Brennan
- 17 May 2017
As the Church of 2030, we need to be more attentive to the contemplation of believers and our experience of spiritual realities, as well as the preaching of the church. Pope Francis has no time whatever for the notion of the Church as a perfect society. But, there is no way that Francis wants to abandon the ideals and the commitment to truth and justice so well exemplified by his predecessors John Paul II and Benedict.
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AUSTRALIA
- Gillian Bouras
- 21 April 2017
16 Comments
Every Anzac Day there seem to be arguments about the legitimacy of what has been called the One Day of the Year. In the past I have taken my turn at rebutting views that express the belief that such days are part of a wholly reprehensible glorification of war. I've had a great deal of time to think about the matter, and also have a personal involvement: my grandfather and father were in the Australian Army, and both saw active service, about which periods they hardly ever spoke.
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INTERNATIONAL
- Jeremy Clarke
- 09 December 2016
2 Comments
Trump's phone call with Tsai Ing-wen is to diplomacy what Happy Gilmore's slap shot was to the Pro Golf Tour. It defies all convention, is appallingly out of context, and should not even work, but it might just augur a new way of doing things. That conversation disrupted previous norms, some of which resulted from decades of delicate, often secret, negotiations. In the midst of the confected outrage it is worth considering the event within the context of contemporary US-China relations.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Brian Doyle
- 09 December 2015
2 Comments
If a three-year-old likes bears, you are into bears for the foreseeable future. Bears have been around since before there were pencils, my young friend said, which is inarguably true, and not something I had ever considered before. When we talk about what is lost in a world in which wilderness is lost, we never talk about the loss of the life we imagine. When there are no bears in the world, then no children will dream of bears, and draw bears, and sleep with bears, and that will be a terrible shame.
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