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Keywords: Monk

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Luther's flawed hardware decisions

    • Brian Doyle
    • 28 January 2015
    27 Comments

    Martin Luther was absolutely correct and right philosophically when he nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to a chapel door in Wittenberg. The Catholic Church was rife with greed and corruption and scandal and lies and theft and devious financial plots, as it still is, and probably always has been. But I maintain that Luther was utterly wrong and incorrect in his choice of tools.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Paul Collins illuminates sectarian divide in Australian history

    • Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
    • 19 December 2014
    4 Comments

    The chasm between Catholics and Protestants is thankfully unknown to my children. Paul Collins' new book A Very Contrary Irishman - The Life and Journeys of Jeremiah O'Flynn is a labour of love that presents a very driven man of the colonial era whose actions - and attributed actions - changed lives and helped shape our culture.

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  • RELIGION

    Why Bishop Morris was sacked

    • Frank Brennan
    • 24 June 2014
    53 Comments

    'My one new insight from reading Bill's book is that he was sacked because he was too much a team player with his local church ... the Romans hoped to shatter the morale and direction of those who had planned the pastoral strategies of a country diocese stretched to the limits as a Eucharistic community soon to be deprived of priests in the Roman mould.' Frank Brennan launches Benedict, Me and the Cardinals Three by Bishop William Morris.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Thai coup more of the same

    • Michael Kelly
    • 26 May 2014
    3 Comments

    The cycle of election, opposition protest, social and political instability that provokes a royal approved military intervention underlies how immature democracy is in Thailand. Unfortunately, in the medium term — the next five years — it will be 'same, same' unless there is a circuit breaker. That may come with the next trigger to instability which has to be set off sooner rather than later: the death of a very frail royal person.

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  • RELIGION

    Deeper dysfunction behind the Ellis case

    • Tim Wallace
    • 03 April 2014
    12 Comments

    In 2004, two years into the Sydney Archdiocese's botched handling of a sexual abuse complaint against Fr Aidan Duggan, the executive director of the Church's National Committee for Professional Standards did something extraordinary: he inquired into whether Duggan, prior to joining the Archdiocese in 1974, had form. It is the only evidence of a Church official actively attempting to check Duggan's past — an attempt destined to fail.

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  • RELIGION

    Thinking Christians spurn hammy creationism

    • Chris Middleton
    • 18 February 2014
    33 Comments

    Australian-born creationist Ken Ham argues that every human is descended from Adam and Eve, that God created man and all land animals on the same day 6000 years ago, and that there were dinosaurs on Noah's Ark. The relationship between faith and reason goes to the credibility of being a Christian in the modern world. A minority view within Christianity should not be allowed to frame a false dichotomy between religion and science.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Cold silent life of a football monk

    • Frank O'Shea
    • 12 February 2014
    5 Comments

    He worked as a shoemaker in a local shoe store, and all the girls in town were secretly in love with him. In a football-mad town, he played at centre half back on the local team and was in that position the year they were beaten in the championship final. After that game, he disappeared. Finally, the truth came out. He had gone into a Cistercian monastery in the foothills of the Knockmealdown mountains.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    No Buddhist bullets in Thai turmoil

    • Paul Kay
    • 24 January 2014
    4 Comments

    It's often said in Thailand that the three pillars of Thai society are Buddhism, the monarchy and the nation, or political system. In recent months I've witnessed many noisy anti-government protests in Bangkok where political groups have been very visible. But amid the turmoil, Buddhism and the monarchy are notably absent. The low profile of the monarchy is easily explained. The absence of Buddhism is more puzzling.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Best of 2013: Coalition stirs the ghost of Jimmie Blacksmith

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 13 January 2014
    2 Comments

    More than a century after Federation, Australia has yet to resolve this tension between a romantic notion of what 'Australia' is, and the depravities that were undertaken to attain it. It may be couched in more polite terms, but it rears its head in ham-fisted and fundamentally disrespectful approaches to Indigenous policy, such as recent moves by the Coalition Government that threaten to undercut the spirit of Native Title legislation.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Coalition stirs the ghost of Jimmie Blacksmith

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 12 December 2013
    5 Comments

    More than a century after Federation, Australia has yet to resolve this tension between a romantic notion of what 'Australia' is, and the depravities that were undertaken to attain it. It may be couched in more polite terms, but it rears its head in ham-fisted and fundamentally disrespectful approaches to Indigenous policy, such as recent moves by the Coalition Government that threaten to undercut the spirit of Native Title legislation.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Cheap shots at religious fish out of water

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 16 May 2013
    11 Comments

    While Anthony the Maronite is dismissive of his Buddhist hosts' beliefs, Freeman the Buddhist finds meaning in the symbols and rituals of Catholicism. The overly simplistic intention seems to be to set open and inclusive Eastern religion alongside narrow-minded, arrogant Western Christianity.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Pilgrims in the landscape of lament

    • Benedict Coleridge
    • 19 April 2013
    7 Comments

    He was the same age as me and had the same name. But he looked old. He'd left Nigeria and walked to Macedonia; four years of walking. His feet were covered in callouses, dried and thickened. In the course of these wanderings he had been kidnapped, beaten and starved. The irregular migrants in Macedonia have come to the end of the road.

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