Keywords: Once And Future Bible
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AUSTRALIA
- Max Jeganathan
- 24 March 2025
Amid rising hate speech and tighter laws, something deeper festers. In a culture wired for outrage and shaped by tribal algorithms, we’re learning not just to disagree, but to despise. What happens when identity is built on enmity, and public debate becomes less about ideas and more about who we’re against?
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INTERNATIONAL
- Jim McDermott
- 16 January 2025
In Los Angeles, wildfires blur the line between disaster and daily life. Evacuation alerts, smoke-filled horizons, and neighborhoods turned to ash coexist with packed restaurants and holiday plans. As the fires rage on, one question persists: is this the new normal?
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INTERNATIONAL
- Mark Beeson
- 04 November 2024
The Doomsday Clock remains at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it’s ever been to calamity. In addition to the atomic scientists’ original concern about nuclear war, now climate change and the possible dangers of AI are parts of a potentially combustible mix. In short, there is much to fret about for anyone paying attention.
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INTERNATIONAL
Whatever the outcome in the United States elections, the most powerful countries are ruled by elderly men. This fundamental and ominous failure of a new generation to supplant its elders bodes ill for the future.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
Recent years have made clerical child sexual abuse a badge of shame within Australia’s Catholic hierarchy, and rightly so. But Anne Manne’s new book, Sins of the fathers, will give pause to those who blame these offences on the rule of hieratic celibacy.
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INTERNATIONAL
- Kylie Crabbe
- 29 March 2023
2 Comments
The recent decision by Puffin Books to revise new editions of Roald Dahl's corpus has sparked debates about the changing cultural mores of our times and the way we read older texts. Navigating the challenges of reading texts from another time must be accompanied by an awareness of the worldviews that shaped them.
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AUSTRALIA
- Glenn Loughrey
- 14 December 2022
1 Comment
In reflecting upon the Statement from the Heart, we need to explore what it is, what it is not, and how it works. The creative dynamic of the Statement is that it is a tool of justice and heart-healing. It is restorative justice writ large, involving the elements that make up the process leading to a resolution of the past and a creative response to the future by enacting justice in the present.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Jennifer Gribble
- 14 October 2021
8 Comments
Well before the pandemic, the future for poetry’s slim volumes was looking far from healthy. Last November, the threatened closure of UWA Press, one of the largest publishers of poetry in Australia, drew attention to the narrowing opportunities for emerging poets to make their mark.
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RELIGION
- Gideon Goosen
- 23 September 2021
60 Comments
The Final Report of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse identified clericalism as a significant contributor to abuse across religious institutions Australia-wide. Clericalism is rooted in a theological belief that the clergy are different to the laity, having undergone an ‘ontological change’ at ordination, and feeds the notion that the clergy may not be challenged. And according to the report, the culture of clericalism is on the rise in seminaries in Australia.
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RELIGION
- Frank Brennan
- 15 January 2018
2 Comments
'Most of his life, Dr Johnson was a priest. Most of his life, he started his day sharing this bread of life with the world. He spent his childhood years here in Rocky, and he enjoyed his twilight years here. Rockhampton was home. Yet the cosmopolitan Grove was ever so much more at home in Rome, Paris or Sydney. And he meant that as no offence to the people of Rockhampton.' Homily delivered for the funeral of the 94 year old priest Grove Johnson.
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AUSTRALIA
- Moira Rayner
- 22 March 2016
18 Comments
When I received my invitation to 'lead' the Palm Sunday Walk for Refugees my first response was to ignore it. This was partly ego and partly disillusionment. It's true that in Melbourne at least 6000 people walked or struggled or strode along Spencer Street. But I no longer believe marches for huge national issues have any effect on local powerbrokers. I believe as Saul Alinsky said that the most powerful force for change is local activism on local issues and generational organisation from the grass roots up.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Richard Leonard
- 28 January 2016
18 Comments
This is one of the angriest films you will ever see. In the Bible we hear about righteous anger, where God or humanity realises something is so wrong and sinful that 'holy anger' is the first and right response. At its best in the scriptures this anger leads to justice, making things right. Spotlight is an occasion for holy, righteous anger and every adult Catholic should see it.
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