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Keywords: Purgatory

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Why we keep coming back to Groundhog Day

    • Paul Mitchell
    • 22 February 2024
    1 Comment

    Since its release, audiences, critics and philosophers have grappled with Groundhog Day’s take on time and eternity. Like all great art, Groundhog Day resists easy categorisation and is a story that, in a wonderful irony, we can go to again and again.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    After Christianity, what is Australia's civil religion?

    • Michael Jensen
    • 19 January 2024
    4 Comments

    In contrast to the United States, we in Australia ‘don’t do God’, and we rarely acknowledge the religious dimension of our national identity. In an age of declining adherence to the Christian faith, has Australia found a new civil religion? And will it serve us well? 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Love, mercy and schadenfreude

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 02 November 2022
    4 Comments

    The town celebrated Guy Fawkes day and burned an effigy of the man who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament centuries before. For days beforehand, even as the holy women left the churches where they had prayed for the release of souls from punishment, children would be dragging carts and prams around with Guy Fawkes dummies they’d made, stuffed with straw and newspaper like scarecrows, easy to burn.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    From persecution to protection and the purgatory in between

    • Kerry Murphy
    • 28 October 2021
    5 Comments

    Mark Twain is reported to have said ‘history does not repeat, it rhymes.’ Watching a US helicopter evacuating people from the US Embassy in Kabul, that was rhyming. Many have seen this picture before, 30 April 1975, but then it was Saigon. The massive confusion, mixed messages, terrified people, lack of human rights protection happened in 1975, and still happens in 2021.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The continuing crisis in immigration detention

    • Nicola Heath
    • 17 December 2020
    6 Comments

    Many refugees in Australia live in conditions that the rest of the population would find unacceptable. Most of the 192 refugees who were transferred to Australia under the Medevac legislation between February and December 2019 are currently held at hotels in Melbourne and Brisbane, known as ‘alternative places of detention’ (APOD), where they have had no access to the outdoors or fresh air for more than 12 months.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Tall Fences, Taller Trees and film as resistance

    • 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.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Clive James' poetry of memento mori

    • Philip Harvey
    • 29 November 2019
    12 Comments

    Obituarists sharpened their quills in 2014 when word had it the death of Clive James was imminent. Since then we have witnessed a late flowering of poetry, reviews and articles tinged with mortality that revealed to the last his Twainian flair for journalistic self-promotion, albeit in the internet age. Now the quills are out in earnest.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Art, economics, science, and all that jazz

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 04 February 2019
    9 Comments

    The Five Quintets is a long, conversational poem of almost 350 pages. In an age that focuses on detail, its topic is vast: the nature of Western modernity and its future. In a secular age its perspective is unobtrusively but deeply religious. It is therefore unlikely to make the best-sellers list. But it is an important and rewarding work.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Time to stop punishing the unemployed

    • El Gibbs
    • 21 November 2018
    10 Comments

    Australia’s income support system and employment services have shifted to an ever harsher regime of compliance and penalty, while failing to find work for hundreds of thousands of people. 

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  • RELIGION

    What religions really say about suicide

    • Rachel Woodlock
    • 15 June 2018
    14 Comments

    Amid the shock and grief for Anthony Bourdain's death, one blue-tick Twitterer attempted to capture five minutes of shameful fame, declaring that religious people believe hell or purgatory is his afterworld destination. While all the great religious traditions generally proscribe suicide, they also contain nuanced views of the suicide's fate.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Feminism colluding with religion to manage men's sexual desire

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 03 July 2015
    25 Comments

    British student Hanna Yusuf declared her hijab to be not an instrument of oppression but rather a feminist statement: 'In a world where a woman’s value is often reduced to her sexual allure, what could be more empowering than rejecting that notion?' But reducing a woman to her sexual allure is precisely what the hijab does.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Ricky Ponting's homilies

    • Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
    • 15 November 2013
    3 Comments

    Punter is a bloke's bloke, 'brung up' in a limited but nurturing suburbia of cricket, cricket, golf and cricket. I was genuinely touched by his acknowledgement of the role his wife, Rianna, and their daughters have played in his maturation. Yet while life experiences invariably expanded young Ponting's mind, it's fair to say that there remains something of the awkward teen in the man.

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