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Keywords: Christmas Story

  • RELIGION

    Moving on from a soiled 2012

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 21 December 2012
    12 Comments

    We might associate the world events of 2012 with the worsening threat of global warming and continuing misery of Syria; Australian politics with the misery inflicted on asylum seekers; the Church through the lens of sex abuse. That is why in New Year celebrations the old year is ritually banished and the new welcomed. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Coming to terms with Christmas

    • Ellena Savage
    • 21 December 2012
    2 Comments

    My most vivid childhood Christmas memories have little to do with Christmas. In one, I'm rifling through the antique wooden bowl beside my grandmother's fireplace, finding hundreds of ancient marbles. They glow in the amber light that spills through the hand-crafted lead-glass lights. I don't even remember the presents I got that year.  

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Retirement home bureaucracy comes unstuck

    • Brian Matthews
    • 07 December 2012
    8 Comments

    Pam, 90, returned to her room to discover that three family photos had been removed from her wall by order of the new manager. Blu-Tack, it seemed, was expressly forbidden. Her complaints were met with a promise that the manager would consider alternatives. A few days later he came up with a 'solution'.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Family Christmas torture and triumph

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 29 November 2012
    2 Comments

    This year, in my immediate family, there has been a separation, the sale of a beloved home, the purchase of another house, and the birth of a child, my nephew. If you, like me, are someone who is accustomed to Christmas Day as a 'family occasion', you may be equally aware of the fraught nature of that innocent description. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Sins of the Church and the BBC

    • Michael Mullins
    • 29 October 2012
    8 Comments

    The Jimmy Savile scandal in Britain shows the Catholic Church is not alone among trusted public institutions undermined by their own silence and denial. An Irish clergy abuse victims advocate has written of the hypocrisy of the BBC in its reporting of abuse crimes in the Church.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Music rising from the ashes of abuse

    • Frank O'Shea
    • 24 October 2012
    8 Comments

    In their stylish red and blue uniforms, they were a central part of big football games. They played before the game and at half time, led the teams in a formal march, 60 or more kids blowing brass and beating drums. The thousands in the stands were unaware of the harshness that these boys faced every day.

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  • RELIGION

    Aboriginal Catholics' culturally enriched living

    • Frank Brennan
    • 02 October 2012
    6 Comments

    'It has been helpful to have the Pope offer the encouragement that there need not be any conflict between Christian faith and Aboriginal culture. But Aboriginal culture is often founded on religious beliefs which find and express God's self-communication outside of Christ and the Church's seven sacraments.' Fr Frank Brennan SJ's address 'Culturally Enriched Through the Gospel' at the NATSICC Conference on 1 October 2012.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Human lives Australia could have saved

    • Tony Kevin
    • 05 September 2012
    14 Comments

    Australian maritime safety and border protection authorities could have saved the lives of most of the people on the boat that made two distress calls by telephone to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority early last Wednesday. Instead they passed the responsibility to Indonesia, which has none of the sophisticated resources and technologies that Australia uses - when it wants to - to locate and intercept incoming unauthorised boats.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Australia's ad hoc refugee rescue costs many lives

    • Tony Kevin
    • 09 July 2012
    21 Comments

    When distress calls come from asylum seeker boats, Australia's current policy is to rescue by choice. Many of the calls come from the Indonesian search and rescue region. To its credit, Australia usually responds to these calls. But not always. Sometimes we pass them to the less well equipped Indonesian search and rescue authority BASARNAS and wait to see what happens.

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  • RELIGION

    Australia's 20 year search for the right asylum policy

    • Frank Brennan
    • 26 June 2012
    18 Comments

    Last week’s tragedy of another mass loss of life at sea between Indonesia and Christmas Island focuses our minds yet again on an intractable public policy problem for Australia – our search for a coherent, workable and moral asylum policy.

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  • RELIGION

    Easter in detention

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 06 April 2012
    13 Comments

    Over many years I have celebrated Christmas and Easter in places where people are locked up — in refugee camps, prisons and detention centres. To be in these places at such times is hard. It is also a privilege.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Breaking the 'boat people' deadlock

    • Lyn Bender
    • 30 January 2012
    37 Comments

    In his book They Thought They Were Free, Milton Mayor writes of 'the slow lobster boil of erosion of freedom' in Nazi Germany. As a daughter of Jewish refugees I know what this entails. The same process confronts asylum seekers today if we do not begin from a presumption of rights and humanity. 

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