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Vol 19 No 18

14 September 2009


 

  • RELIGION

    Learner lobbyists let loose on Canberra

    • Neil Ormerod
    • 25 September 2009
    3 Comments

    When the Hawke-Keating Government cut back funding for overseas aid, churches said nothing. Last week, 260 Christian young people set out to lobby politicians about Australia's failure to meet its obligations to developing nations.

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  • EUREKA STREET TV

    Freemasons show the Church how to handle Dan Brown

    • Peter Kirkwood
    • 25 September 2009
    2 Comments

    Brown's presentation of connivance and corruption in the upper echelons of the Catholic Church in The Da Vinci Code provoked a hostile response from the Church. The Freemasons have reacted more constructively to their portrayal in Brown's latest thriller.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Cannibal convict's tour of hell

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 24 September 2009
    1 Comment

    The first feature film about Australia's most notorious convict shares a potent symbiosis with Dante's Inferno. Director Jonathan auf der Heide believes there is a repressed need for violence beneath the 'veil' of human civilisation.

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  • RELIGION

    Reasons for violence

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 24 September 2009
    7 Comments

    Stabbings, bashings and glassings are much reported and much deplored. Now the violent video game Left 4 Dead 2 has been banned. Violence goes with being human. It may be avoidable, but it is not likely to be avoided.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Guatemala the grave

    • Colm McNaughton
    • 23 September 2009
    3 Comments

    The exhumation of mass graves in Guatemala, sites of decades-old massacres, rarely leads to convictions. The history of Guatemala's indigenous Mayan communities is marked by slavery, poverty and genocide. Not much has changed.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    How not to make a toast

    • Brian Doyle
    • 23 September 2009

    My mother-in-law stood up on the night before her daughter married me, held her glass aloft, and sighed, 'Let's just hope this one comes off'. Some of the best toasts I ever heard were from children: 'Here's to all mum's husbands past and present!' said one girl, aged 11.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Death by tiger

    • L.K. Holt
    • 22 September 2009
    1 Comment

    The teenage boy .. drunk, taunting, now hanging from .. your latch of jaw

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Indigenous people power challenges mining might

    • Moira Rayner
    • 22 September 2009
    10 Comments

    The Martidja Manyjima people of the Pilbara want a WA mining registrar to hear their challenge to BHP Billiton's claim for more mining leases on 200 square kilometres of their traditional land. The outcome will affect every one of us.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Layman's guide to the climate debate

    • Bronwyn Lay
    • 21 September 2009
    16 Comments

    There is no opting out of the scientific debate. It has to be followed and understood by the layman because power seems to be setting up shop at its heart. The possibility of 'all being rooned' cannot be the sole motivation to live ethically on the earth.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Telstra's price gouging is a sin

    • Michael Mullins
    • 21 September 2009
    7 Comments

    There is nothing wrong with mums and dads buying shares as an exercise in responsible stewardship of family assets. But they need to be ready to face consequences if profiting from their investments involves exploiting other Australians.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    The rise of Deaf Pride

    • Frank O'Shea
    • 18 September 2009
    16 Comments

    Those of us with normal hearing feel good if we think technology such as cochlear implants can help deaf people to hear. But Deaf people generally have little interest in 'cures'. They value their identity and see no value in becoming a different person.  

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Gloves off for climate crunch

    • John Wicks
    • 18 September 2009
    6 Comments

    Some will be concerned by the black and white treatment of climate change in Tony Kevin's book. There is common ground now to generate significant policy changes with a focus on wellbeing, even while the CO2 debate continues to rage.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Back to the future for international students

    • Hanifa Deen
    • 17 September 2009
    6 Comments

    Visits by our senior politicians offering glib reassurances will not halt the turndown in Indian enrolments in our tertiary institutions. We need to revisit the days when we treated international students as people rather than statistics in an export industry.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    MasterChef winner roasts the media

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 17 September 2009
    5 Comments

    Addressing members of the Australasian Catholic Press Association, MasterChef winner and Catholic Julie Goodwin decried the vicious and personal nature of some online forums, and the so-called journalists who draw upon them for articles.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    One year on, Garnaut's glass half full

    • Tony Kevin
    • 16 September 2009
    5 Comments

    If anyone expected Ross Garnaut to be bitter about the Government's inadequate response to his 2008 Review, they were wrong. He is optimistic about the positive public impact of the Review and said climate change denialists are 'grasping at straws'.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Larrikin poet's Sentimental 'slanguage'

    • Brian Matthews
    • 16 September 2009
    3 Comments

    C. J. Dennis once wrote that, as a boy, he had 'a devout and urgent desire to become a larrikin'. The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke provides a window on part of Australian culture and the traditions, speech and images that forged it.

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  • RELIGION

    Sympathy for Father Bob

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 15 September 2009
    30 Comments

    It's doubtful that any Australian priest communicates more intuitively with young Australians than Bob Maguire. Fr Maguire's 'forced' retirement has universal relevance as the story of the predicament of ageing community workers.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    African parables

    • Grant Fraser
    • 15 September 2009
    2 Comments

    Men who stood before the gate .. trail the weight of empty hands, empty pockets .. Back to the shanties .. Where children are launching imagined craft .. Away from the stench of earth .. Into pools .. the colour of Keen's Mustard.

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  • RELIGION

    On reclaiming Christianity from the West

    • Irfan Yusuf
    • 14 September 2009
    24 Comments

    Tony Abbott has described the New Testament as 'the core document of our civilisation'. As a South Asian Muslim, I'd like to think many Christians would be as incensed by attempts to treat Christianity as uniquely Western as I am when Islam is treated as uniquely Arab.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Thoughtful flesh consumption hard to swallow

    • Michael Mullins
    • 14 September 2009
    19 Comments

    Eating meat is a moral issue. We understand that sexual desires need to be met in a context of moral probity, or it's likely we will cause psychological damage to ourselves or others. But food consumption is wrongly regarded as morally neutral.

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