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Author: Paul Collins

  • ENVIRONMENT

    Strategies for a new era of firestorms

    • Paul Collins
    • 21 August 2009
    5 Comments

    There were many mistakes made on Black Saturday and the Interim Report of the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission points them out. For now the commissioners avoid the 'bigger fire questions', but in the end these will have to be faced.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Life of a 'geologian'

    • Paul Collins
    • 11 June 2009
    12 Comments

    Thomas Berry (1914-2009), Catholicism's most significant thinker in ecological theology, argued that religion had failed to provide a way of making sense of the cosmos. Christians oppose homicide, but have no morality to deal with the killing of the planet.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Conway's maverick way

    • Paul Collins
    • 30 March 2009
    10 Comments

    Ronald Conway (1927–2009) was of a rare breed in Australia. He stood against the prevailing climate of thought which ignores important questions of faith, spirituality and human experience, and focuses on the conventional and politically correct.

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  • MEDIA

    The true history of religion on Radio National

    • Paul Collins
    • 25 February 2009
    29 Comments

    The public response to the axing of The Religion Report and other specialist programs late last year by ABC Radio National management was astonishing. But the response of the ABC was abysmal. It is time to tell the whole story.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Politics stymie bushfire response

    • Paul Collins
    • 13 February 2009
    12 Comments

    Though the fires are still burning, the blaming has already begun, with environmentalists and academics pitted against rural people and firefighters. We have entered a new era of fires and will need to take a long, ecologically sensitive look at what has happend.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    More than Sex and Bloody Soccer

    • Paul Collins
    • 14 November 2008
    2 Comments

    SBS television has been called many things, including the 'sexual broadcasting service', because of the risqué foreign language films that it shows. SBS radio is the ultimate melting pot, a symbol of an inclusive Australian multiculturalism in which different languages and cultures are respected.

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  • RELIGION

    Gentle Benedict concedes papal roadshow must go on

    • Paul Collins
    • 11 July 2007
    14 Comments

    Following earlier scepticism, Pope Benedict XVI last week confirmed that he is coming to Sydney for World Youth Day next July. Unlike his predecessor, he doesn't see himself as ‘bishop of the world’. Instead he has reasserted the traditional pastoral role of the pope as Bishop of Rome.

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  • RELIGION

    Downsizing as a form of modern asceticism

    • Paul Collins
    • 13 June 2007
    8 Comments

    We live in a world where the dogmas of economic rationalism and consumerism rule supreme. Rather than physical penance, today's asceticism involves a deliberate downsizing and an abandonment of infinite expansion as the measure of success.

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  • RELIGION

    Australians quietly spiritual, not Godless

    • Paul Collins
    • 15 May 2007
    17 Comments

    In 2005, Pope Benedict targeted Australians as world leaders in Godlessness. However a recent book argues that Australian spirituality is understated, wary of enthusiasm, authority, and characterised by "a serious quiet reverence".

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    The psychology of climate change denial

    • Paul Collins
    • 16 April 2007
    2 Comments

    The economic tools we are using to deal with climate change are inappropriate, and the long-term consequences for local areas are largely unknown. Global warming skeptics should critique the analysis of climate change rather than just retreat into a psychology of denial.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Populate and our environment will perish

    • Paul Collins
    • 27 February 2007
    8 Comments

    Australia is not infinite; there is a limit to our productive capacity and we may well have already exceeded it. One of the unmentionable and politically incorrect questions is how many people the continent can sustain while retaining some respect for the integrity of the landscape.

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  • CONTRIBUTORS

    Paul Collins

    • Paul Collins
    2 Comments

    Paul Collins is an historian, broadcaster and writer. The author of 13 books, his most recent is The Birth of the West (2013). He is well known as a commentator on Catholicism and the papacy and has also written about the environment and population.

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