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Keywords: Vanity

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    On the anniversary of a poet's birth, a universal message to nations

    • Warwick McFadyen
    • 20 February 2024

    ‘The loss of memory by a nation is also a loss of its conscience.’ As the loss of conscience grows with each succeeding generation, one day righting the boat on the sea of forgetfulness will become impossible. In the end, what people don’t know, they won’t miss. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Best of 2023: Tim Winton's wild nature

    • David Halliday
    • 04 January 2024

    The name Tim Winton conjures up images of ocean surf and wild remote beaches. With four decades under his belt as Australia's most celebrated novelist, Winton has long explored the mysteries of the natural world in the pages of his novels. Now, speaking to Eureka Street, Tim Winton discusses his new documentary Ningaloo Nyinggulu and why we need to rethink our relationship to the wild.  

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    God in a time of threat

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 12 October 2023
    3 Comments

    Pope Francis' latest Exhortation 'Laudate Deum,' is an evocative sequel to 'Laudato Si’, juxtaposing the urgency of our environmental predicament with the fragility of human hope. Before the upcoming COP28 conference, as nations teeter between action and inertia, the Pope's message is clear: our shared environment, and the most vulnerable among us, hang in the balance.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Tim Winton's wild nature

    • David Halliday
    • 16 May 2023
    6 Comments

    Arguably Australia's most celebrated novelist, Tim Winton conjures up images of ocean surf and wild remote beaches, having spent decades exploring the mysteries of the natural world in the pages of his novels. Now, speaking to Eureka Street, Tim Winton discusses his new documentary Ningaloo Nyinggulu and why we need to rethink our relationship to the wild.  

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Tolstoy’s war

    • Philip Harvey
    • 03 March 2022
    12 Comments

      One of the most memorable scenes in Russian literature relates the thoughts of a man lying on the ground staring at the sky in the middle of a major European battle. Prince Andrei Bolkonsky is wounded. He is placed in a situation where, instead of running, fighting, and thinking every moment might be his last, he is suddenly met with silence, grandeur, tranquillity.

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  • RELIGION

    Anniversary of St Ignatius’ encounter with a cannonball

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 20 May 2021
    29 Comments

    20 May marks the five hundredth anniversary of a chance event with large consequences. In 1521 a stray cannonball ricocheting off a castle wall in a minor skirmish broke the leg of a knight defending the castle. It had large consequences for him and for the world. The long convalescence of Ignatius Loyola after the siege of Pamplona changed the direction of his life and shaped the church and world that we inherited.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    The politics and ethics of the moon landing

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 23 July 2019
    5 Comments

    In 1964, sociologist Amitai Etzioni noted the misgivings of the scientific fraternity to the space program. The effort risked losing perspective. An 'extrovert activism' had taken old, obsessed with gadgets, 'rocket-powered jumps' and escapism. In terms of budgetary expenditure, this showed, with NASA spending $28 billion between 1960-73.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    No simple case of right and wrong

    • Robert DiNapoli
    • 20 May 2019
    6 Comments

    The work that's held my undivided heart now hangs upon the lip of the inane, a path I've struck, unwinding meaning's ball, or else a futile tangle, every day more lost to telos, purpose and design. No one else seems to have passed this way.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The indispensable joy of time spent alone

    • Neve Mahoney
    • 24 April 2019
    9 Comments

    It's liberating to buy a ticket for one. To not have to coordinate times with someone, but do things by my own schedule. To go see the niche movie none of my friends wants to see, or the art exhibition I forgot was in town until its last day. But alone time isn't just something I do because I like it. I need it.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    'Virtue signalling' and other slimy words

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 20 March 2019
    17 Comments

    The slimy words are those that convict their targets of simulating virtue. They include the old favourite 'bleeding hearts', the perennial 'political correctness' and the most recently minted 'virtue signalling'. They are slimy because they purport to be counters in rational argument but dismiss opposed arguments without engaging with them.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A parent's guide to pop culture diversity

    • Fatima Measham
    • 26 April 2018
    3 Comments

    The moment in Power Rangers when Cam Watanabe turned into the Green Samurai, I looked at my son's face and could sense what it meant to him. Pop culture validates or marginalises, depending on who is in the frame. Who gets to be seen and heard, and under what circumstances, are political decisions, whether consciously or not.

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  • RELIGION

    Uncontrollable Irma and Fr John George

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 20 September 2017
    20 Comments

    I was reminded of the importance of the uncontrollable by the recent death of Fr John George, a Sydney priest who daily submitted comments on our Eureka Street articles, some of which we published. Though no Hurricane Irma, the literary Fr George, the only one whom we knew, was nevertheless easily seen as terrifying and fascinating. Our efforts to control George reminded us of how limited is our capacity to control and how, as we control, we can turn people into ciphers and threats to be dealt with.

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