Welcome to Eureka Street

back to site

Keywords: Religious Poetry

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Carrying the weight of the daily news

    • Cherie Gilmour
    • 29 March 2022

    A house bursts into flames as it’s submerged in floodwaters. A doctor tells a cameraman filming a dying Ukrainian child to send the footage to Putin. A newspaper delves into the murder of a young woman. It’s like a fever dream: a pandemic bleeds into the edges of a global war. The news presents information, and it has no moral duty to tell us how we should feel about it or help us untangle the knot of feelings which emerge. 

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Slow Train Coming: Bob Dylan’s spiritual journey

    • Paul Mitchell
    • 01 June 2021
    11 Comments

    Like the best religious poetry, Dylan’s works resists easy interpretation and remains open to endless meditation. Dylan’s overtly political songs — ‘Hurricane’, ‘Political World’ — and love songs — ‘Idiot Wind’, ‘Tangled up in Blue’ — have often been challenging. It’s the same with his religious output.

    READ MORE
  • RELIGION

    Why thinking Indigenously is important for Australian theology

    • Garry Deverell
    • 18 May 2021
    19 Comments

    It is no coincidence that white ‘settler’ theology in this country has barely begun to engage with Indigenous people. Arguably, it has only begun to do so because the Indigenous citizens of the churches have begun to cast off the imaginative shackles made for us by our white gubbas and find our own voice.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    That first sanctuary

    • Ian Smith
    • 21 July 2020
    1 Comment

    He enters a university library at thirty-five feeling like an imposter, rougher-hewn from suffering than most students, wrapped in an aura he thinks religious pilgrims experience shuffling along echoing naves of Gothic cathedrals, sombre, joyous.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The friendly statues

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 16 July 2020
    6 Comments

    These statues form part of the rich texture of our daily lives, personal histories and cultural environment. They invite tolerant smiles rather than scowls. This article celebrates a selection of friendly Melbourne statues that have reflected places where they and I have stood. It invites you to make your own selection.

    READ MORE
  • RELIGION

    Farewell to a revolutionary

    • Antonio Castillo
    • 22 March 2020
    13 Comments

    Nicaraguan Ernesto Cardenal, Catholic priest, poet and revolutionary, was an essential figure of Latin American liberation theology. He died on March 1. He was 95. Cardenal’s spiritual life was the unyielding foundations of his country’s social and political struggle.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    My moments with catholic Les Murray

    • Tracey Edstein
    • 02 May 2019
    3 Comments

    I asked Les then what he anticipated at the end of what was for him a very earthed life. Les was phlegmatic — he imagined a reunion with his parents (his mother died when he was 12) but was content to 'wait and see ... we are on certain post-mortem promises after all'.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Art, economics, science, and all that jazz

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 04 February 2019
    9 Comments

    The Five Quintets is a long, conversational poem of almost 350 pages. In an age that focuses on detail, its topic is vast: the nature of Western modernity and its future. In a secular age its perspective is unobtrusively but deeply religious. It is therefore unlikely to make the best-sellers list. But it is an important and rewarding work.

    READ MORE
  • RELIGION

    Christianity tells stories; Islam finds designs

    • Michael McGirr
    • 31 October 2018
    21 Comments

    My year ten class studies Islam, one of the most formative influences in the world that my students will inhabit and hopefully improve. I have a profound respect for Islam. Westerners often fail to acknowledge the debt they owe to Islam, a tradition that had a huge role in bringing Europe through the Dark Ages and into the Renaissance.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The woman who got me into Ned Kelly’s funeral

    • Martin Flanagan
    • 02 July 2018
    6 Comments

    We share a love of poetry, having come to Gerard Manley Hopkins from opposite directions, her from religious ecstasy, me from the dark sonnets. In the 1980s we met, in a shelter for Aboriginal women in Collingwood. My next memory? Ursula introducing me to the granddaughter of Kelly's sweetheart, an old woman dying in a Melbourne hospital.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Civilisation beyond the con of neoliberalism

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 26 June 2018
    35 Comments

    Just in time to arrest ponderous musings about Western Civilisation, up jumps Denniss' cheeky funeral oration for the neoliberal settlement. His target is the assumption that an economy based on unregulated competition between individuals will benefit society. He does not spend time arguing with the theory, but points to the results.

    READ MORE
  • RELIGION

    I am afraid of dying, but I have hope

    • Moira Rayner
    • 27 March 2018
    5 Comments

    This Easter, and Orthodox Easter, and Passover, and at the changing of the seasons, I am prepared to reassert my faith. That whatever evil brings, compassion, courage and passionate commitment to the old values of honesty, accountability and care for others will bring the enormous change that was promised so long ago.

    READ MORE