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Keywords: The Dirty Word

  • AUSTRALIA

    Re-building the commons: In conversation with Joshua Lourensz

    • Michael McVeigh
    • 06 February 2024

    In a world that has become increasingly more divided in the aftermath of the pandemic, Executive Director of Catholic Social Services Victoria Joshua Lourensz is questioning how we might best re-develop a sense of the commons to reignite our communities and foster social responsibility?

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Inconsistency in the treatment of foreign fighters

    • Irfan Yusuf
    • 12 April 2022
    15 Comments

    In a space of 40 years, Russia has been our enemy, then our friend and now is an enemy again. Russia is again attacking Ukraine. We are convinced the Ukrainian cause is just. But we also know that we face a domestic far-Right terrorism threat at home. What if young impressionable foreign fighters with little knowledge of Ukrainian history, politics and internal conflicts find themselves fighting with and influenced by anti-Semitic and Islamophobic neo-Nazi groups?

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    The Russian view on Ukraine: An international law perspective

    • Justin Glyn
    • 07 March 2022
    26 Comments

    Ukraine, a site of conflict over many centuries, is once again the scene of battle. First thoughts must be with the civilian population and Pope Francis’ call for prayer is probably the most practical course for most of us far from the action. Unfortunately, while it is clear that there have been casualties, both military and civilian, on both sides, the fog of war makes it very difficult to say more. 

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  • ECONOMICS

    The gift of work

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 13 August 2020
    6 Comments

    Amid the disruption of predictable life wrought by the coronavirus, governments have focused on jobs. Jobs lost in the response to the virus, and jobs created as we emerge from the crisis. The focus is worthy — behind each job lost is a person whose life has become anxious and uncertain. The language, however, is concerning. Defining the challenge as one of creating jobs expresses an understanding of work, the inadequacy of which the coronavirus has laid bare.

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  • MEDIA

    The killing of Daphne Caruana Galizia

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 05 December 2019
    5 Comments

    In Malta, shudders are being felt through the media and political establishment. Prime Minister Joseph Muscat has announced his intention to resign. Other officials are doing the same. Malta's equivalent of the accusing ghost of Banquo is that of the slain journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, killed by a car bomb in October 2017.

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  • RELIGION

    On love, money and Valentine's Day

    • Barry Gittins
    • 13 February 2019
    6 Comments

    Valentine's Day is built on some fairly shaky historical ground. Rather than honouring a prelate offering bridal trysts, or hoping for a good harvest, I'm inclined to spare a thought for the Greek philosophers and poets who set up shop well before Romulus and Remus; I like to muse over their various efforts to pin down love.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Remembrance Day, 2016

    • Barnaby Smith and Earl Livings
    • 03 November 2017
    5 Comments

    Think also of you, my father, tending to aircraft engines, or helping out on black-market runs in small cargo planes ... No action as such, though early in the war you crossed submarine-haunted seas on a troop ship, and patrolled a jungle aerodrome ...

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Our mothers called us little fish

    • Chelsea Candy
    • 02 November 2017
    2 Comments

    You'd swear a dinghy was alive. Sometimes she was sluggish and moody, refusing to set, dragging me along a grey sea. Or she hurtled like a stallion, not caring if we won or if we went over, me hanging off the side by my ankle straps, not knowing where we would end.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A Romantic view of 'darkling' modern world

    • Brian Matthews
    • 07 September 2017
    2 Comments

    Born a few months after Shelley drowned and desperate to understand the living Nature the Romantics had known, Matthew Arnold too found the natural world had gone silent. Where Wordsworth had heard 'strange utterance [in] the loud dry wind' and 'the sky seemed not a sky / Of earth - and with what motion moved the clouds', Arnold sadly concluded that 'the world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new, hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light ...'

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  • RELIGION

    The risk and future visioning of sustainable Catholic services

    • Frank Brennan
    • 29 March 2017
    1 Comment

    'We need to be more focused on grace, Christ and God's word, rather than just on law, the Church and papal utterances. But today, I will draw more on law, the Church and the Pope to point us towards those more fruitful domains: grace, Christ and God's word. Our future visioning needs to focus more on the gospel imperatives including the option for the poor and the dignity of all persons, including those who are non-believers.' Address to Catholic Health Australia's Catholic Governance Symposium, 27 March 2017

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Faith and humanism behind Tim Winton's curtain

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 26 October 2016
    1 Comment

    'When I was a kid I liked to stand at the window with a rifle and aim it at people.' So begins the opening, titular essay. It is a singularly arresting entre to an essay that charts the author's complex relationship with firearms (part awe, part terror), by way of commenting on the place of guns in Australian society. In this collection of essays Winton adopts this mode frequently, weaving (sometimes deeply) personal narratives into stirring, thoughtful commentary on a broad range of social and political issues.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    A word to the wise on selling climate action

    • Greg Foyster
    • 11 March 2016
    3 Comments

    The best known examples of framing come from American cognitive linguist George Lakoff. He argues that George W. Bush replaced the phrase 'tax cuts' with 'tax relief' to reframe paying tax as an affliction. Embedded in those two words is a neo-conservative worldview against government intervention in the private sphere. If you accept the term, you absorb the worldview. In a similar way, a few words could build political will to tackle climate change. The problem is no one is sure what they are.

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