Keywords: New Look
There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
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AUSTRALIA
- Julian Butler
- 22 February 2022
5 Comments
Having previously spent time as lawyer working predominantly in the Children’s Court of Victoria, there isn’t too much about the State’s treatment of young people that shocks me. That is, until a few weeks ago when I was drawn to the final item of The Weekend Australian’s editorial column. Under the heading, ‘Hurt boy’s inhuman treatment’, was set out the details of a 15-year-old West Australian boy who had been ‘locked alone in a glass-walled observation cell of a juvenile detention centre in the southern suburbs of Perth for 79 days.’
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Barry Gittins
- 15 February 2022
11 Comments
Did you make the annual obeisance to St Valentine’s Day traditions [read purchases] on the 14th? Last year, Australians were projected to spend $1.1 billion on Valentine’s Day gifts as St Valentine’s Day was lauded and backed by marketers, glamorising Romantic ardour and infatuation, glorious, all-consuming passion, and a thirst for intimacy and transcendence.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Paul Mitchell
- 10 February 2022
6 Comments
American novelist Jonathan Franzen has in his last three fictional works taken words that loom large in the collective consciousness and built worlds around them. First, it was Freedom (2010), then Purity (2015), and now Crossroads (2021). The latter title, of course, refers to a literal and figurative decision-making moment, but also the mythic locale where blues singers, notably Robert Johnson, made their pacts with the devil.
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RELIGION
- Simon Smart
- 04 February 2022
10 Comments
How are your New Year’s resolutions going? One that probably didn’t make the list was: forgive more. But maybe it should have. I recently met a couple, Danny and Leila Abdallah, who have a compelling story to illustrate that, while challenging, forgiveness offers unexpected rewards. I interviewed them for a podcast and can’t stop thinking about them.
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AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 25 January 2022
24 Comments
In recent years, Australia Day has been a holiday without title. It has been marketed as a day for all Australians, but is held on a date is seen increasingly as the beginning of the dispossession and humiliation of the First Australians. As a result it is generally received as an opportunity to laze around undisturbed by serious thoughts about Australia.
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AUSTRALIA
- Julie Edwards
- 18 January 2022
2 Comments
The images are simultaneously striking and terrifying. A raging grassfire that is shooting flames into the sky and destroying nature around it and lapping perilously close to the fences around Central NSW’s Lithgow Correctional Centre. As local residents were evacuated and highways were closed to protect public safety when the fire raged out of control just before Christmas in 2019, 400 prisoners remained detained.
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INTERNATIONAL
- 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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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Barry Gittins
- 14 January 2022
4 Comments
We’ve been in a pressure cooker, these past two years. More than a score of historians had memorably described 2020 as the sixth-most ‘stressful year ever’. Predictions and speculations look ahead; I looked at the past trends of the past two years and make these humble observations. With the stage set for dire times, here are six trends to look for in 2022. Here’s hoping.
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ECONOMICS
- David James
- 04 January 2022
3 Comments
There really is no such thing as ‘capitalism’ — or rather there are so many capitalisms that the word is altogether too imprecise to be useful. A much better term to identify the problems, even evils, of modern developed economies is ‘corporatism’. This can be precisely identified and its transgressions and general harm are getting worse.
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RELIGION
- Miles Pattenden
- 16 December 2021
29 Comments
Pope Francis turns eighty-five this week. His pontificate has seen him emerge from obscurity in Argentine Church politics to become, late in life, a global cultural icon and one of the most popular popes in living memory. Over the past nine years he has invigorated the Church and, according to papal biographer Austen Ivereigh, has made the papacy ‘much more human, much more accessible, much less remote’.
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RELIGION
- Andrew Hamilton
- 16 December 2021
19 Comments
Christmas is always a mixture of nostalgia, weariness, connection and hope. This year the strands that compose it are even more tangled. We hope to return to the pre-Covid normal of celebration without anxiety. We look forward to the New Year as a gate to freedom to travel, work and plan our lives without hindrance. At the same time, however, our plans are conditional. We realise that Covid has not left us, and that its mutations may lead to more interruptions and restrictions.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Paul Mitchell
- 09 December 2021
18 Comments
Broken first aired on BBC1 in England in 2017. Four years to make it to Australia, but it was worth it. The series is a profound and powerful study of Christianity and what priesthood means, whether for the man holding up the bread at the altar, or that ‘priesthood of all believers’ to which Christianity’s adherents are said to belong.
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