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  • international

    An indelicate balance: Israel and Iran exchange blows

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 01 May 2024

    For decades, the major powers of Israel, Iran and Saudi Arabia have kept a restraint on their hostile engagements, with preference given to battle waged via proxies. A recent Israeli air strike on Iranian offices in Syria and Iran's subsequent attack on Israel with 185 drones, 110 ballistic missiles and 36 cruise missiles suggested that calculated restraint had been finally abandoned.

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  • arts and culture

    Here we are now, entertain us

    • Barry Gittins
    • 01 May 2024

    The raw power of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ blasted Nirvana past the mainstream and into the realm of music immortality. So what was it about Cobain’s music that resonated with young people in the early 90s and continues to find vast audiences 30 years later?

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  • international

    Famine looms in Sudan as conflict enters its second year

    • Kirsty Robertson
    • 30 April 2024

    One year after civil war erupted, Sudan has become one of the world’s worst humanitarian tragedies with around 5 million people experiencing emergency levels of hunger. This puts Sudan on the brink of famine. Sudanese leaders claim this is the crisis the world has forgotten.

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  • arts and culture

    Vanity and grace in the return of Priscilla

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 29 April 2024

    What are we to make of the enthusiasm that led to the discovery of the bus once used in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and the plan to restore it for a remake, thirty years later? 

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  • australia

    Requiem in a dawn light

    • Peter Craven
    • 24 April 2024

    For those born in the wake of World War II, war stories seemed the greatest fun on earth. But the pity of it is monumental and we come to take it – if not for granted – then at least as part of the fabric of minds that had met with all that was terrible in human experience and all that called out for reverence.  

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  • australia

    The paradox of 'wokeness'

    • Michael McVeigh
    • 22 April 2024

    'Wokeness' is often centred around our need to understand others, particularly marginalised groups, and paradoxially, our inability to do so. The only way to overcome this problem is to find a way to transcend it – to centre our efforts on something greater. What if instead of ‘understanding’, we centre on ‘love’?

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  • Freud's last session

    • Neil Jeyasingam
    • 18 April 2024
    2 Comments

    Freud’s Last Session pits the famous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud against Christian apologist and author C.S. Lewis, a powerful concept, given the sheer cultural heft of the two historical figures. 

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  • Between sense and sensation

    • Nathan Scolaro
    • 11 April 2024
    2 Comments

    Can a chatbot write a poem? The answer reveals something about the heart of human interaction. True connection, like true poetry, requires discomfort, vulnerability and a richness of experience that defies the simplicity of algorithms.  

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  • The Dinner Guest

    • Damian Balassone
    • 09 April 2024
    4 Comments

    The rhetoric of elites / sets off his built-in shit detector. He much prefers to eat / with hookers, drunks and tax collectors.

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  • The road not taken

    • Stephen Yorke
    • 24 April 2024

      On a June day in 1914, a Bosnian nationalist in Sarajevo ignited a chain reaction that reshaped the world. Gavrilo Princip, a 19-year-old student, did not aim to unleash a global conflict. From the halls of imperial power to the fields of battle, how did the shots fired in Sarajevo echo across continents, drawing empires into disarray and redrawing the map of the modern world? (From 2004)

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  • When helpers become victims

    • Joe Zabar
    • 16 April 2024
    1 Comment

    When a missile strike in Gaza killed seven aid workers, it sparked global outrage and demands for accountability and raised questions around the protection of those who risk everything to provide aid in zones of conflict. 

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  • When war becomes personal

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 10 April 2024
    4 Comments

    Our attitudes to war change drastically when it becomes personal. The killing of Zomi Frankcom, together with other members of the Charity organisation World Central Kitchen, made the war between Israel and Hamas personal. It has led many people to see the destruction of Gaza and its people as not only regrettable but intolerable.

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  • Health: Where rights are gifts

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 25 April 2024

    Good health is not an achievement to take credit for. It is something to be grateful for, a sign of good fortune as well as of good living. We must press for health to be seen as a right shared equally by all people throughout the world. And addressing that need in Australia must begin by strengthening our public health system.

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  • Normalising war is the road to hell

    • Warwick McFadyen
    • 25 April 2024

    How about truth as an antidote to war? Who would have stomach for it, though we see war as part of existence? The trouble with its normalisation, such as in games, both in backyards and in cyberspace, is that becomes uncoupled from reality.

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  • Trying to make sense of Joel Cauchi

    • Bill Farrelly
    • 22 April 2024

    It will never be possible to protect the community from a repetition of the horror of April 13. But we can reduce the risk. To begin, we can reassess some of our collective and individual priorities, be more compassionate, less judgemental, more aware of those around us.

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  • Where does Infinite Dignity meet finite reality?

    • Bill Uren
    • 24 April 2024

    The recent Vatican declaration 'Dignitas Infinita' aims to provide a response to pressing bioethical and social issues, from abortion and euthanasia to gender theory and the rights of migrants. But does it effectively bridge the gap between doctrine and the lived experiences of the marginalised?  

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  • Vatican invites global discussion on human dignity

    • David Kirchhoffer
    • 18 April 2024
    4 Comments

    Though there are few surprises in Vatican document 'Dignitas Infinita', this summary of Pope Francis’s moral theology on dignity invites a reevaluation of our shared humanity in the face of an increasingly complex ethical landscape.

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  • The optimism of Timothy Radcliffe

    • John Warhurst
    • 09 April 2024
    8 Comments

    Timothy Radcliffe has a hopeful vision for the Church, yet noting the slow pace of institutional change in his recent visit to Australia, he presented a sort of optimism that eschewed any hope for immediate outcomes. The basis for Radcliffe’s optimism seems to be his assumption that it is acceptable for the Church to take its time. 

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