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Keywords: Option For The Poor

  • RELIGION

    Pope's 'new anthropology' shoots for the moon

    • David Holdcroft
    • 17 August 2009
    7 Comments

    Reflections on the 40th anniversary of the first manned lunar landing can help us understand the major themes of Pope Benedicts's social encyclical, and explain why many critics of this radical document have missed the point.

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  • RELIGION

    Sharing our paradoxes: steps for a dialogue between Christians and Muslims

    • Herman Roborgh
    • 25 June 2009

    The scriptures of both Islam and Christianity are full of paradoxes. Some readers of paradoxes simply emphasise only one part of the paradox. (Full text of Herman Roborgh's Dialogue Australasia article, May 2009.)

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Ethical keys to a just budget

    • John Warhurst
    • 12 May 2009
    1 Comment

    Catholic Social Teaching promotes the common good, distributive justice and a preferential option for the poor as key principles to underpin any budget. If might is right then the preferences of the strong will overpower those of the vulnerable.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    US halts orphans from Vietnam

    • Sarah Nichols
    • 20 February 2009
    42 Comments

    Donation agreements between USA adoption service providers and Vietnamese orphanages are private and negotiable. Some orphanage directors admitted there was a strong financial incentive to maximise the number of children available for adoption.

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  • RELIGION

    Educating leaders for the contemporary Australian Church

    • Frank Brennan
    • 06 October 2008

    'Lee and Christine Rush are your average Ozzie couple, except that their teenage son Scott is on death row in Bali having been convicted of being a hapless drug mule. It will not go down well on the streets of Jakarta if Australians are baying for the blood of the Bali bombers one month and then pleading to save our sons and daughters the next month.'

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  • AUSTRALIA

    'Stalinist' Mugabe won't go without a fight

    • Peter Roebuck
    • 03 September 2008

    Sensing humiliation and still uttering vapid rhetoric about 'insidious foreign hands', Mugabe has lowered himself to talking to his opponents. The old rogue is not going anywhere except in a box or at the end of a gun.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Poultry parable for homeless youth

    • John Honner
    • 12 August 2008
    21 Comments

    Imagine a young person in State care trying to access the rental market with no money or employment history. Beryl the Chook was last in the pecking order, but through a 'constructive alliance' her strengths began to overcome her defecits.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Dorothy Day and the price of pacifism

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 21 November 2007
    5 Comments

    There is more behind pacifism than intellectual conviction. For Dorothy Day, pacifism found a central place in a life of intellectual enquiry, hospitality to the poorest of people and protest against injustice. Her emphasis on pacifism remained constant and costly.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Making obligation mutual

    • Frank Quinlan
    • 14 November 2007

    For the unemployed, single parents and people with disabilities, mutual obligation is about pushing income support recipients into the labour market. It’s a combination of help and hassle — but with the emphasis increasingly on hassle.

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  • RELIGION

    'See, judge, act' more than truth by consensus

    • Stefan Gigacz
    • 27 June 2007
    5 Comments

    The See Judge Act method has been used by church and other groups for many years, as a means of putting social justice principles into practice. Conservative critics have recently described it as the manufacturing of truth by consensus, but it has more to do with a common search for truth.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Changed climate will cook the elderly

    • Kate Mannix
    • 04 September 2006
    4 Comments

    When the human body gets to 42°C, it starts to cook. Death is inevitable, and it is the most vulnerable who will go first. While the CSIRO has projections on the likely effects of climate change in Australia, there has been little work on what that will actually mean for human health outcomes in specific regions.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Undeclared war on Haiti's poor

    • Kent Rosenthal
    • 10 July 2006
    5 Comments

    Living conditions in Ouanaminthe, a ‘town’ of around 100,000 inhabitants amount to an undeclared war on the poor. There’s a lack of services, which makes Ouanaminthe a gathering place for human traffickers, smugglers and corrupt authorities ready to profit from people desperate to leave for the Dominican Republic.

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