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Keywords: What Matters

  • AUSTRALIA

    Unpacking the Statement from the Heart

    • Glenn Loughrey
    • 14 December 2022
    1 Comment

    In reflecting upon the Statement from the Heart, we need to explore what it is, what it is not, and how it works. The creative dynamic of the Statement is that it is a tool of justice and heart-healing. It is restorative justice writ large, involving the elements that make up the process leading to a resolution of the past and a creative response to the future by enacting justice in the present.

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  • RELIGION

    Catholic political leaders: Does faith matter?

    • John Warhurst
    • 15 November 2022
    16 Comments

    Australia is awash with politicians who identify or are identified as Catholic. And Catholic media always take some interest in Catholic politicians whatever their political stripe. But what does this mean to have Catholic politicians from a theologically and ideologically diverse church? 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The book corner: Reappropriating stolen memory

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 16 September 2022
    1 Comment

    Joel Birnie’s short and admirable book provokes reflection both on what should have mattered in the relationships between colonial invaders and Indigenous peoples in the nineteenth century and on what matters in the relationships that constitute Australia today. 

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  • ECONOMICS

    Why we need new rules for money

    • David James
    • 23 August 2022
    4 Comments

    Now that it is becoming hard to avoid just how much trouble the global financial system is in, it is interesting to speculate about what should be done about it. The first thing to understand about the global financial system is that the assumptions that were used to shape it are demonstrably false.

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  • RELIGION

    After the Plenary

    • Geraldine Doogue
    • 27 July 2022
    7 Comments

    What did the Plenary mean exactly, and what is next for the church? Secretary to the Council, Fr David Ranson, offers a rich and bracingly realistic set of observations about the Plenary Council. As secretary, Fr David was deeply absorbed in the lead-up, in the events of the week itself and now in assessing what comes next. He might surprise you with his judgements. They're delivered by a man with an acute sense of Church procedures but also with an eye to possibilities. 

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  • RELIGION

    What can we expect from the Plenary Council? A Roundtable

    • Geraldine Doogue, Greg Craven, John Warhurst, Julian Butler
    • 17 June 2022
    3 Comments

    After four years, the Fifth Plenary Council of Australia is nearly at a close with the second and final assembly in July. So what has been the significance of the Plenary Council so far, and what can we expect from the final session? In this Roundtable, Geraldine Doogue, John Warhurst, Greg Craven and Julian Butler reveal their hopes and expectations for the process and discuss likely outcomes.

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  • RELIGION

    I am unashamedly pro-life, but let me tell you what that means

    • Beth Doherty
    • 19 May 2022
    10 Comments

    I have always considered myself pro-life. It’s not something I’ve felt a need to wear as a badge of honour, rather it has always been a default position. But terminology matters. Indeed, frequently, calling myself pro-life has drawn the derision or raised eyebrows of people around me, nuns and priests and radical ratbags alike, it has connotations.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The challenges of self-assessment

    • Emma Wilkins
    • 17 May 2022
    6 Comments

    I’d been thinking about my own productivity as an employee, as a freelancer, as a parent; about what left me feeling satisfied, worthy, competent or guilty, unproductive, unfulfilled. I’m convinced we should value people for who they are, not what they do, or don’t or cannot do. And yet I catch myself, thinking about, talking about, how much I have or haven’t done on any given day; forgetting to reflect on how I have behaved, on the kind of parent, wife, colleague, friend that I’ve been.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    April is the cruellest month

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 07 April 2022
    6 Comments

    Palm Sunday alternates between March and April. When, as this year, it is celebrated in April it keeps company with a number of days that provoke us to ask what and who matter, what and whom can you trust. If it is a cruel month, it is so because it tests, even mocks, our comfortable assumptions. In a year overshadowed by manifestations of climate change, of persistence of Covid and of the horrors of war, it is not a bad month to endure an election.

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  • RELIGION

    What is to be done?

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 24 March 2022
    10 Comments

    Any program of church reform will have soon to ask Chernyshevsky’s question, What is to be done? It is a dangerous question — he wrote his novel from jail and spent much of his life in exile or imprisonment. Discussion of Church matters is mercifully less perilous today, but the question does invite a radical repiecing of the connections and tradition and energies that constitute Catholic life.

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  • RELIGION

    What now for senior clergy who covered up abuse?

    • Miles Pattenden
    • 27 January 2022
    31 Comments

    Many Catholics will have found the news from Germany this past week painful. A law firm, Westpfahl Spilker Wastl, has presented findings in its investigation into historic sexual abuse in the Munich archdiocese. Running to 1,000 pages, the report is shocking: it lists at least 497 victims for the period 1945–2019 and identifies 235 probable offenders including 173 priests and nine deacons.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Broken: A profound study of Christianity and the priesthood

    • Paul Mitchell
    • 09 December 2021
    18 Comments

    Broken first aired on BBC1 in England in 2017. Four years to make it to Australia, but it was worth it. The series is a profound and powerful study of Christianity and what priesthood means, whether for the man holding up the bread at the altar, or that ‘priesthood of all believers’ to which Christianity’s adherents are said to belong.  

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