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Keywords: Santa

  • RELIGION

    Keating’s Timor and Carr’s Papua

    • Frank Brennan
    • 30 November 2012
    17 Comments

    Paul Keating this month reflected on his determination as Prime Minister 'to establish a new and durable' relationship with Indonesia' and lamented the Australian media and his predecessors' preoccupation with human rights abuses in East Timor. It'd be churlish to question these reflections if the current Foreign Minister were not on the cusp of making a similar mistake regarding Papua.

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  • RELIGION

    Advancing human rights in Australia

    • Frank Brennan
    • 17 October 2012
    1 Comment

    Full text from Fr Frank Brennan SJ's address 'Advancing human rights in Australia — lessons from the National Human Rights Consultation' at the 'Human Rights Matters!' conference marking Anti-Poverty Week 2012. 17 October 2012, Cardinal Knox Centre, St Patricks Cathedral, Melbourne.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    My life as a Florence tour guide

    • Benedict Coleridge
    • 22 August 2012
    6 Comments

    All is not quite lost. There's still Michelangelo's David in the Academia — that's 'famous' and always makes for a good Facebook album cover. But after queuing for two hours, you feel rather underwhelmed — David isn't the 20m high statue of a ripped male you had been expecting, and there isn't a secret passageway leading from his gluteus maximus to a torture chamber beneath the Vatican.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    What Australia doesn't want East Timor to know

    • Pat Walsh
    • 05 April 2012
    10 Comments

    The famine of 1977–79 cut a swathe through East Timor's civilian population. Having failed to subdue the Timorese, the Indonesian military opted to starve them out. Details from that little-understood period are contained in cables that Attorney-General Nicola Roxon has blocked from public access.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Jesus and his kids

    • Various
    • 28 February 2012
    3 Comments

    they say what's with the whole guy on the cross thing, man, that's macabre, that's sick, you people look at a guy dying of torture every day, you hang him in your churches and houses and offices, you carry a dying guy in your pocket, that's just weird, and I try to say he's a dad ...

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  • AUSTRALIA

    When my kids believed in Santa and God

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 22 December 2011
    5 Comments

    My daughter, at seven, imagines a Barbie doll that does not exist, one that has 'a very cool gun and real lipstick'. My son, at five, asks for 'a Jeep, a hot air balloon and real false teeth'. These preserved Christmas lists record my children's growth more accurately than their physical measurements.

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  • CARTOON

    What Abbott, Gillard and Santa have in common

    • Fiona Katauskas
    • 14 December 2011
    1 Comment

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  • RELIGION

    What difference does it make now that Mary MacKillop is a saint?

    • Frank Brennan
    • 14 October 2011

    Mary visited Rome as a young religious woman when she was being persecuted by local bishops for being too independent. She got a good hearing from the Pope and great assistance from Fr Anderledy who became the Superior General of the Jesuits. If only Bishop Bill Morris could have received the same sympathetic hearing.

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  • RELIGION

    Making friends not foes of rights and religion

    • Frank Brennan
    • 13 September 2011
    5 Comments

    The Church of the 21st century should be the exemplar of due process, natural justice and transparency. While there can be little useful critique of the final decision of Pope Benedict to force the early retirement of Bishop Bill Morris, there is plenty of scope to review the processes leading up to it.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    ASIO and me

    • John Warhurst
    • 03 August 2011
    1 Comment

    I received the documents in a battered brown suitcase. They were from a time of high drama within the Movement and the Labor Party concerning the Labor Split. In the course of my research, I wrote to several international sources. This brought me to the attention of the CIA and ASIO. 

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  • RELIGION

    Eyeballing injustice

    • Frank Brennan
    • 02 May 2011
    1 Comment

    Jesuit Social Services recently set up a project in Alice Springs to resource the local parish and local Aborigines who want to take more control of their own lives. If we are to get our teeth into issues of acute injustice, we need to eyeball both the decision makers and those affected by those decisions.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Where children used to play

    • Vin Maskell
    • 09 February 2011
    4 Comments

    After she died — her mind went first, then the rest — he moved across town, where he lived in a different type of street. A busy street with traffic and noise. No place for a street party. Once a year, though, he returns to see the next generation of neighbours. New leaves on old trees.

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