Keywords: The Death And Life Of Otto Bloom
There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
-
FAITH DOING JUSTICE
- Andrew Hamilton
- 18 February 2021
37 Comments
We live in a time when around the world so many lives seem not to matter. Whether they be Uighur lives, women’s lives, Black lives, Yemeni lives or refugee lives. So widely disregarded in practice, the large claim that every life has value, however, oftentimes has to be justified. The ultimate reason is that each human being is precious and has an inalienable dignity. No person may be used as a means to another’s end.
READ MORE 
-
INTERNATIONAL
- Catherine Marshall
- 21 January 2021
8 Comments
What will it take, I wonder, to change these people’s minds? In an era as politically divisive as the one Americans (and Australians, for that matter) are living through, nothing is likely to convince detractors that COVID is an omnipresent threat — except perhaps the only thing with tangible currency in this whole blasted catastrophe: the visceral consequences of the pandemic itself.
READ MORE
-
INTERNATIONAL
- Andrew Hamilton
- 03 December 2020
17 Comments
This week is the fortieth anniversary of the death of Ita Ford and Maura Clarke in El Salvador. An event distant in place and time, but worth remembering and honouring in its distance. And also worth reflecting on for its significance for our own time.
READ MORE
-
RELIGION
- Ross Jones
- 01 December 2020
6 Comments
Approaching the walled and caged building where the sentence was carried out, our young fellows have always been struck by something of a paradox proclaimed in two signs at the door: ‘Bureau of Corrections’ alongside ‘Lethal Injection Chamber’. They were quick to seize upon it. ‘How can you correct and rehabilitate a person after you have killed him?’ they would ask.
READ MORE
-
INTERNATIONAL
- Andrew Hamilton
- 26 November 2020
7 Comments
Stories of volunteers who went to help in foreign crises used to focus on the impact on the people helped. Today they explore how both parties are changed through the experience. That was also true in Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) whose 40th anniversary occurred last week.
READ MORE
-
ARTS AND CULTURE
- Brian Matthews
- 24 November 2020
5 Comments
In measures now sadly familiar in 2020, theatres were closed once the number of weekly deaths exceeded 30, later 40, but because actors and the theatre world itself were so economically vulnerable, actors, understandably intent on earning a living, soon legally or otherwise cut themselves some slack by taking liberties with the rules governing performances and quarantine — again, a phenomenon that is now, against all previous odds, familiar to people of 2020.
READ MORE
-
ENVIRONMENT
- Andrew Hamilton
- 03 November 2020
17 Comments
These last weeks the possible re-election of Donald Trump has been one of the dark birds that visit many of us in the night. As with other such epochal events, of course, how we might react internally to it is of vastly less weight than its effect on the world. Neither early morning wandering nor anything else we can do will change that. But it might shape our response.
READ MORE
-
RELIGION
- John Warhurst
- 08 October 2020
39 Comments
Recent weeks have seen the deaths of former NSW Liberal Premier and federal Finance minister, John Fahey, and former Labor federal minister, Senator Susan Ryan. They were both exemplary public figures who not only made a major contribution to Australian public life but did so in a way that drew praise from all sides of politics.
READ MORE
-
ARTS AND CULTURE
- Arnold Zable
- 06 October 2020
4 Comments
Tall Fences, Taller Trees, directed by Dutch-based Iranian filmmaker, Arash Kamali Sarvestani, is a companion to Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time, which Sarvestani co-directed with Kurdish-Iranian writer and Manus Island detainee, Behrouz Boochani. On its most basic level Tall Fences, Taller Trees documents the making of the first film, but it is far more than that.
READ MORE
-
AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 01 October 2020
7 Comments
The response to COVID has invited reflection about the relative value of one human death (and so of one human life) as compared with another. This is a radical question because it makes us ask whether the value of a human life is defined by economic wellbeing and by potential contribution to the economy, or by deeper qualities.
READ MORE
-
AUSTRALIA
- Tim Hutton
- 01 October 2020
9 Comments
For many people, illness has a narrative: a clear beginning, middle and end. If we’re lucky, the ending is actually a fresh start where the illness is gone and our hero is returned to normal life, changed but stronger because of their ordeals. In the lives of those with chronic illness, however, those lines are blurred; our descent into illness may have been gradual and there might be no end in sight.
READ MORE
-
RELIGION
- Bill Uren
- 15 September 2020
250 Comments
Whereas the Vatican II document sought to engage with, and to respect, the autonomy of the modern world and its science, only too many of the Vatican’s official statements over the past fifty years have effectively resiled from that commitment.
READ MORE