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Keywords: America

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The thing with feathers

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 29 September 2022
    5 Comments

    Humans depend greatly on hope. In a recent interview, Tova Friedman discusses her book The Daughter of Auschwitz, the memoir of the part of her childhood spent in the eponymous and notorious concentration camp. Can someone who has seen first hand the depths of human depravity be at all hopeful about the future?

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Nicaragua’s Catholic Church: A nuanced conflict

    • Antonio Castillo
    • 01 September 2022
    2 Comments

    In Nicaragua, Catholic priests and institutions are under siege. In the last five months, the Ortega regime has increased its persecution of the Church, accusing them of being ‘terrorists.’ The conflict has been further exacerbated by the detention of Bishop Rolando Álvarez, the most outspoken critic of Ortega. In less than four years, the Church has suffered 190 attacks, including a fire in the Cathedral of Managua. However, the crisis in Nicaragua is not as clear-cut as it might seem.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Is social media harmful? A Roundtable

    • David Halliday, Beth Doherty, Tim Dunlop, Matthew Howard
    • 26 August 2022

    When former Facebook employee Frances Haugen released a trove of documents revealing internal research on the negative effects its social media products were having on mental health, the darker side of social media became hard to ignore. So how might the harmful effects of social media be mitigated into a social benefit for a saner, more coherent society? 

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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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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The book corner: Beyond belief

    • Barry Gittins
    • 12 August 2022

    Journalist and author Elle Hardy spent 15 months researching and writing her 2021 work Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity is Taking Over the World. She notes the estimation that by 2050, one billion people around the world (one in 10 humans) will be a Pentecostal follower of Jesus (and their pastor).

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Discovery or cover-up?

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 11 August 2022
    9 Comments

    Much has recently written about the doctrine of discovery and its bearing on the treatment of Indigenous peoples, particularly in the United States where it grounded an early legal decision. The doctrine enshrined in law claims that the discovery of underpopulated and cultivated lands conferred on the discoverers the right to ownership, and was used to justify colonial occupation of territory in the Americas, Asia and Africa.

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  • RELIGION

    Doctrine of Discovery: How a papal teaching subjugated Australia’s First Nations people

    • BJ Cruse
    • 07 July 2022
    7 Comments

    The subjugation of the world’s First Nations people was enshrined in the Doctrine of Discovery, a series of papal decrees made by Pope Alexander VI in 1493, where any land not inhabited by Christians was available to be ‘discovered,’ claimed, and exploited by Christian rulers. The Doctrine of Discovery legitimised Christian explorers’ claims to land uninhabited by Christians, promoting and fortifying Christian domination, and forcing original inhabitants into Christianity. 

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    America after Roe v Wade

    • Chris Middleton
    • 05 July 2022
    17 Comments

    The overruling of the Roe v Wade decision by the Supreme Court in the Dobbs decision marks a significant moment in the abortion debate, while highlighting the deep fissures in America’s body politic. Despite the fact that the Supreme Court ruling had been foreshadowed months ago, the shock has been real.

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  • RELIGION

    Why rad trads and reformers need to start talking to one another

    • Beth Doherty
    • 01 July 2022
    6 Comments

    Debate between more traditionalist Catholics and those who want to see reforms more fully implemented has become increasingly heated in the lead-up to the Plenary Council. One thing that could prevent a serious split from happening is the simple act of talking — and listening — to one another. 

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  • RELIGION

    Plenary Council fails to embrace Pope Francis’s wider social vision

    • Bruce Duncan
    • 21 June 2022
    3 Comments

    Some 278 Catholic bishops, clergy, religious personnel and lay people will meet as members of an unprecedented Plenary Council during 3-9 July to finalise the resolutions of their first assembly last year. However the May working document ‘Framework for Motions’, despite much worthy content, especially on Indigenous affairs, relies on a narrow notion of mission overly focused on inner-church issues at the expense of the wider social engagement that Francis emphasises.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Can financial fictions survive reality?

    • David James
    • 31 May 2022
    2 Comments

    As commodity prices and inflation soar in the ‘real’ world we may be witnessing a prelude to another 2008-style crisis triggered by the foreign exchange markets. The risks certainly look similar and can be described with a simple question. Can the fictions produced by out-of-control financial actors survive reality? 

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  • RELIGION

    Roe vs Wade: The Bishops’ dilemma

    • Miles Pattenden
    • 26 May 2022
    19 Comments

    News leaked earlier this month that the US Supreme Court plans to overturn its most famous decision, that in Roe vs Wade (1973) which protects a pregnant woman's freedom to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restriction. The decision has attracted much criticism both in the past and now on account of its dubious legal reasoning – in particular, its attempt to link the right to abort to a right to privacy which itself was notional and not specified in the US Constitution.

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